THE HOUSE OF QUIET

The House of Quiet

THE
HOUSE OF QUIET

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

By
Arthur Christopher Benson

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
1907

Copyrighted by
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
1907

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PREFACE

I have been reading this morning a very pathetic and characteristic document. It is a paper that has lurked for years in an old collection of archives, a preface, sketched by a great writer, who is famous wherever the English language is spoken or read, for the second edition of a noble book. The book, on its first appearance, was savagely and cruelly attacked; and the writer of it, hurt and wounded by a mass of hateful and malevolent criticisms, piled together by an envious and narrow mind, tried, with a miserable attempt at jaunty levity, to write an answer to the vicious assailant. This answer is deeply pathetic, because, behind the desperate parade of cheerful insouciance, one seems to hear the life-blood falling, drop by drop; the life-blood of a dauntless and pure spirit, whose words had been so deftly twisted and satanically misrepresented as to seem the utterances of a sensual and cynical mind.

In deference to wise and faithful advice, the preface was withheld and suppressed; and one is thankful for that; and the episode is further a tender lesson for all who have faithfully tried to express the deepest thoughts of their heart, frankly and sincerely, never to make the least attempt to answer, or apologise, or explain. If one’s book, or poem, or picture survives, that is the best of all answers. If it does not survive, well, one has had one’s say, thought one’s thought, done one’s best to enlighten, to contribute, to console; and, like millions of other human utterances, the sound is lost upon the wind, the thought, like a rainbow radiance, has shone and vanished upon the cloud.

The book which is here presented has had its share both of good and evil report; and it fell so far short of even its own simple purpose, that I should be the last to hold that it had been blamed unduly. I have no sort of intention of answering my critics; but I would wish to make plain what the book itself perhaps fails to make plain, namely, what my purpose in writing it was. The book grew rather than was made. It was, from the first, meant as a message to the weak rather than as a challenge to the strong. There is a theory of life, wielded like a cudgel by the hands of the merry and high-hearted, that the whole duty of man is to dash into the throng, to eat and drink, to love and wed, to laugh and fight. That is a fine temper; it is the mood of the sailor-comrades of Odysseus—

“That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads.”

Such a mood, if it be not cruel, or tyrannous, or brutal, or overbearing, is a generous and inspiriting thing. Joined, as I have seen it joined, with simplicity and unselfishness and utter tenderness, it is the finest spirit in the world—the spirit of the great and chivalrous knight of old days. But when this mood shows itself without the kindly and gracious knightly attributes, it is a vile and ugly thing, insolent, selfish, animal.

The problem, then, which I tried to present in my book, was this: I imagined a temperament of a peaceful and gentle order, a temperament without robustness and joie de vivre, but with a sense of duty, a desire to help, an anxious wish not to shirk responsibility; and then I tried to depict such a character as being suddenly thrust into the shadow, set aside, as, by their misfortune or their fault, a very large number of persons are set aside, debarred from ambition, pushed into a backwater of life, made, by some failure of vitality, into an invalid (a word which conceals many of the saddest tragedies of the world)—and I set myself to reflect how a man, with such limitations, might yet lead a life that was wholesome and contented and helpful; and then, at the last, I thought of him as confronted with a prospect of one of the deepest and sweetest blessings of life, the hope of a noble love; and then again, the tyrannous weakness that had laid him low, swept that too out of his grasp, and bade him exchange death for life, darkness for the cheerful day.

Who does not know of home after home where such things happen? of life after life, on which calamities fall, so that the best that the sufferer can do is to gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost? This book, The House of Quiet, was written for all whose life, by some stroke of God, seemed dashed into fragments, and who might feel so listless, so dismayed, that they could not summon up courage even to try and save something from the desolate wreck.

To compare small things with great, it was an attempt to depict, in modern unromantic fashion, such a situation as that of Robinson Crusoe, where a man is thrown suddenly upon his own resources, shut off from sympathy and hope. In that great fiction one sees the patience, the courage, the inventiveness of the simple hero grow under the author’s hand; but the soul of my own poor hero had indeed suffered shipwreck, though he fell among less stimulating surroundings than the caverns and freshets, the wildfowl and the savages, of that green isle in the Caribbean Sea.

In the Life of William Morris, a man whose chosen motto was si je puis, and who, whatever else he was accused of, was never accused of a want of virile strength, there is an interesting and pathetic letter, which he wrote at the age of fifty-one, when he was being thrust, against his better judgment, into a prominent position in the Socialist movement.

“My habits are quiet and studious,” he said, “and, if I am too much worried with ‘politics,’ i.e., intrigue, I shall be no use to the cause as a writer. All this shows, you will say, a weak man: that is true, but I must be taken as I am, not as I am not.”

This sentence sums up, very courageously and faithfully, the difficulty in which many people, who believe in ideas, and perceive more clearly than they are able to act, are placed by honest diffidence and candid self-knowledge. We would amend life, if we could; but the impossibility lies, not in seeing what is beautiful and just and right, but in making other people desire it. It is conceivable, after all, that God knows best, and has good reasons for delay—though many men, and those not the least gallant, act as though they knew better still. But it matters very little whether we betray our own weakness, by what we say or do. What does matter is that we should have desired something ahead of us, should have pointed it out to others. We may not attain it; others may not attain it; but we have shown that we dare not acquiesce in our weakness, that we will not allow ourselves to be silent about our purer hopes, that we will not recline in a false security, that we will not try to solve the problem by overlooking its difficulties; but that we will strive to hold fast, in a tender serenity, to a belief in the strong and loving purpose of God, however dark may be the shadow that lies across the path, however sombre the mountain-barrier that lies between us and the sunlit plain.

A. C. B.

April 12, 1907.

PREFATORY NOTE TO ORIGINAL EDITION

The writer of the following pages was a distant cousin of my own, and to a certain extent a friend. That is to say, I had stayed several times with him, and he had more than once visited me at my own home. I knew that he was obliged, for reasons of health, to live a very quiet and retired life; but he was not a man who appeared to be an invalid. He was keenly interested in books, in art, and above all in people, though he had but few intimate friends. He died in the autumn of 1900, and his mother, who was his only near relation, died in the following year; it fell to me to administer his estate, and among his papers I found this book, prepared in all essential respects for publication, though it is clear that it would not have seen the light in his lifetime. I submitted it to a friend of wide literary experience; his opinion was that the book had considerable interest, and illustrated a definite and peculiar point of view, besides presenting a certain attraction of style. I accordingly made arrangements for its publication; adding a few passages from the diary of the last days, which was composed subsequently to the date at which the book was arranged.

I need hardly say that the names are throughout fictitious; and I will venture to express a hope that identification will not be attempted, because the book is one which depends for its value, not on the material circumstances of the writer, but upon the views of life which he formed.

THE HOUSE OF QUIET

INTRODUCTORY

Christmas, Eve, 1898.

I have been a good deal indoors lately, and I have been amusing myself by looking through old papers and diaries of my own. It seems to me that, though the record is a very uneventful one, there is yet a certain unity throughout—I can hardly call it a conscious, definite aim, or dignify it by the name of a philosophy. But I have lived latterly with a purpose, and on a plan that has gradually shaped itself and become more coherent.

It was formerly my ambition to write a book, and it has gone the way of most ambitions. I suppose I have not the literary temperament; I have not got the instinct for form on a large scale. In the books which I have attempted to write, I have generally lost myself among details and abandoned the task in despair. I have never been capable of the fundamental brainwork; the fundamental conception which Rossetti said made all the difference between a good piece of art and a bad one. When I was young, my idea of writing was to pile fine phrases together, and to think that any topic which occurred to my mind was pertinent to the matter in hand. Now that I am older, I have learnt that form and conception are not everything but nearly everything, and that a definite idea austerely presented is better than a heap of literary ornament.

And now it seems to me that I have after all, without intending it, written a book,—the one book, that, it is said, every man has in his power to write. I feel like the King of France who said that he had “discovered” a gallery in one of his palaces by the simple process of pulling down partition walls. I have discarded a large amount of writing, but I have selected certain episodes, made extracts from my diaries, and added a few passages; and the result is the story of my life, told perhaps in a desultory way, but with a certain coherence.

Whether or no the book will ever see the light I cannot tell; probably not. I do not suppose I shall have the courage to publish it myself, and I do not know any one who is likely to take the trouble of editing it when I am gone. But there it is—the story of a simple life. Perhaps it will go the way of waste paper, kindle fires, flit in sodden dreariness about ashpits, till it is trodden in the mire. Perhaps it may repose in some dusty bookshelf, and arouse the faint and tender curiosity of some far-off inheritor of my worldly goods, like the old diaries of my forefathers which stand on my own bookshelf. But if it came to be published I think that there are some to whom it would appeal, as the thin-drawn tremor of the violin stirs the note in vase or glass that have stood voiceless and inanimate. I have borne griefs, humiliations, dark overshadowings of the spirit; there are moments when I have peered, as it were, into the dim-lit windows of hell; but I have had, too, my fragrant hours, tranquil joys, imperishable ecstasies. And as a pilgrim may tell his tale of travel to homekeeping folks, so I may allow myself the license to speak, and tell what of good and evil the world has brought me, and of my faint strivings after that interior peace, which can be found, possessed, and enjoyed.

1

Dec. 7, 1897.

My Room

I sit this evening, towards the end of the year, in a deep arm-chair in a large, low panelled room that serves me as bedroom and study together: the windows are hung with faded tapestry curtains; there is a great open tiled fireplace before me, with logs red-crumbling, bedded in grey ash, every now and then winking out flame and lighting up the lean iron dogs that support the fuel; odd Dutch tiles pave and wall the cavernous hearth—this one a quaint galleon in full sail on a viscous, crested sea; that, a stout sleek bird standing in complacent tranquillity; at the back of the hearth, with the swift shadows flickering over it, is a large iron panel showing a king in a war chariot, with a flying cloak, issuing from an arched portal, upon a bridge which spans a furious stream, and shaking out the reins of two stamping steeds; on the high chimney-board is a row of Delft plates. The room is furnished with no precision or propriety, the furniture having drifted in fortuitously as it was needed: here is a tapestried couch; there an oak bookcase crammed with a strange assortment of books; here a tall press; a picture or two—a bishop embedded in lawn with a cauliflower wig; a crayon sketch of a scholarly head. There is no plan of decoration—all fantastic miscellany. At the far end, under an arch of oak, stands a bed, screened from the room by a dark leather screen. Outside, all is unutterably still, not with the stillness that sometimes falls on a sleeping town, where the hush seems invaded by imperceptible cries, but with the deep tranquillity of the country-side nestling down into itself. The trees are silent. Listening intently, I can hear the trickle of the mill-leat, and the murmur of the hazel-hidden stream; but that slumbrous sound ministers, as it were, the dreamful quality, like the breathing of the sleeper—enough, and not more than enough, to give the sense of sleeping life, as opposed to the aching, icy stillness of death.

2

Early Days

I may speak shortly of my parentage and circumstances. I was the only son of my father, a man who held a high administrative position under Government. He owed his advancement not to family connections, for our family though ancient was obscure. No doubt it may be urged that all families are equally ancient, but what I mean is that our family had for many generations preserved a sedulous tradition of gentle blood through poverty and simple service. My ancestors had been mostly clergymen, doctors, lawyers—at no time had we risen to the dignity of a landed position or accumulated wealth: but we had portraits, miniatures, plate—in no profusion, but enough to be able to feel that for a century or two we had enjoyed a liberal education, and had had opportunities for refinement if not leisure, and aptitude for cultivating the arts of life; it had not been a mere sordid struggle, an inability to escape from the coarsening pressure of gross anxieties, but something gracious, self-contained, benevolent, active.

My father changed this; his profession brought him into contact with men of rank and influence; he was fitted by nature to play a high social part; he had an irresistible geniality, and something of a courtly air. He married late, the daughter of an impoverished offshoot of a great English family, and I was their only child.

The London life is dim to me; I faintly recollect being brought into the room in a velvet suit to make my bow to some assembled circle of guests. I remember hearing from the nursery the din and hubbub of a dinner-party rising, in faint gusts, as the door was opened and shut—even of brilliant cascades of music sparkling through the house when I awoke after a first sleep, in what seemed to me some dead hour of the night. But my father had no wish to make me into a precocious monkey, playing self-conscious tricks for the amusement of visitors, and I lived for the most part in the company of my mother—herself almost a child—and my faithful nurse, a small, simple-minded Yorkshire woman, who had been my mother’s nurse before.

When I was about six years old my father died suddenly, and the first great shock of my life was the sight of the handsome waxen face, with the blurred and flinty look of the dulled eyes, the leaden pallor of the thin hands crossed on his breast; to this day I can see the blue shadows of the ruffled shroud about his neck and wrists.

Our movements were simple enough. Only that summer, owing to an accession of wealth, my father and mother had determined on some country home to which they might retire in his months of freedom. My mother had never cared for London; together they had found in the heart of the country a house that attracted both of them, and a long lease had been taken within a week or two of my father’s death. Our furniture was at once transferred thither, and from that hour it has been my home.

3

The Home Land

The region in which I live is a land of ridge and vale, as though it had been ploughed with a gigantic plough. The high-roads lie as a rule along the backs of the uplands, and the villages stand on the windy heights. The lines of railway which run along the valley tend to create a new species of valley village, but the old hamlets, with their grey-stone high-backed churches, with slender shingled spires, stand aloft, the pure air racing over them. The ancient manors and granges are as a rule built in the more sheltered and sequestered valleys, approached from the high-road by winding wood-lanes of exquisite beauty. The soil is sandy, and a soft stone is quarried in many places by the road-side, leaving quaint miniature cliffs and bluffs of weathered yellow, sometimes so evenly stratified as to look like a rock-temple or a buried ruin with mouldering buttresses; about these pits grow little knots of hazels and ash-suckers, and the whole is hung in summer with luxuriant creepers and climbing plants, out of which the crumbling rock-surfaces emerge. The roads go down very steeply to the valleys, which are thick-set with copse and woodland, and at the bottom runs a full-fed stream, with cascades and pebbly shingles, running dark under scarps of sandstone, or hidden deep under thick coverts of hazel, the water in the light a pure grey-green. Some chalk is mingled with these ridges, so that in rainy weather the hoof-prints in the roads ooze as with milk. The view from these uplands is of exquisite beauty, ridge after ridge rolling its soft outlines, thinly wooded. Far away are glimpses of high heathery tracts black with pines, or a solitary clump upon some naked down. But the views in the valleys are even more beautiful. The steep wood rises from the stream, or the grave lines of some tilted fallow; in summer the water-plants grow with rich luxuriance by the rivulet, tall willow-herb and velvety loosestrife, tufted meadowsweet, and luxuriant comfrey. The homesteads are of singular stateliness, with their great brick chimney-stacks, the upper storeys weather-tiled and the roof of flat tiles of sandstone; the whole mellowed by orange and grey lichens till the houses seem to have sprung from the very soil.

4

Golden End

My own home—bearing the tranquil name of Golden End—is an ancient manor; out of a sandy lane turns an avenue of great Scotch firs, passing the house and inclining gradually in its direction. The house is a strange medley; one part of it is an Elizabethan building, mullioned, of grey stone; one wing is weather-tiled and of simple outline. The front, added at some period of prosperity, is Georgian, thickly set with large windows; over all is a little tiled cupola where an alarm bell hangs. There is a small square garden in front surrounded by low walls; above the house lies what was once a bowling-green, with a terraced walk surrounding it. The kitchen garden comes close up to the windows, and is protected on the one side by a gigantic yew hedge, like a green bastion, on the other by an ancient stone wall, with a tiled roof; below the house lie quaint farm-buildings, cartsheds, barns, granaries, and stables; beyond them are pools, fringed with self-sown ashes, and an orchard, in the middle of which stands a brick dovecot with sandstone tiles. The meadows fall from the house to the stream; but the greater part of the few acres which we hold is simple woodland, where the copse grows thick and dark, with here and there a stately forest tree. The house seen, as I love best to see it, from the avenue on a winter evening, rises a dark irregular pile, crowned with the cupola and the massive chimneys against a green and liquid sky, in which trembles a single star; the pine-trees are blacker still; and below lies the dim mysterious woodland, with the mist rising over the stream, and, beyond that, soft upland after upland, like a land of dreams, out to the horizon’s verge.

Within all is dark and low; there is a central panelled hall with round oak arches on either hand leading through little anterooms to a parlour and dining-room. There are wide, meaningless corridors with steps up and down that connect the wings with the central building; the staircases are of the most solid oak. All the rooms are panelled except the attics, which show the beams crossing in the ancient plasterwork. At the top of the house is a long room which runs from end to end, with a great open fireplace. The kitchen is a huge, paved chamber with an oak pillar in the centre. A certain amount of massive oak furniture, sideboards, chests, and presses, with initials or dates, belongs to the place; but my father was a great collector of books, china, and pictures, which, with the furniture of a large London house, were put hurriedly in, with little attempt at order; and no one has since troubled to arrange them. One little feature must be mentioned; at the top of the house a crazy oak door gives access to a flight of stairs that leads on to a parapet; but below the stairs is a tiny oratory, with an altar and some seats, where the household assemble every morning for a few prayers, and together sing an artless hymn.

5

My Mother

My mother, who through the following pages must be understood to be the presiding deity of the scene—O quam te memorem?—how shall I describe her? Seen through her son’s eyes she has an extraordinary tranquillity and graciousness of mien. She moves slowly with an absolutely unconscious dignity. She is naturally very silent, and has a fixed belief that she is entirely devoid of all intellectual power, which is in one sense true, for she reads little and has no taste for discussion. At the same time she is gifted with an extraordinary shrewdness and penetration in practical matters, and I would trust her judgment without hesitation. She is intensely affectionate, and has the largest heart I have ever known; but at the same time is capable of taking almost whimsical prejudices against people, which, however I have combated them at the time, have generally proved to be justified by subsequent events. Her sympathy and her geniality make her delightful company, for she delights in listening to the talk of clever people and has a strong sense of humour. She likes being read to, though I do not think she questions the thought of what is read. She is deeply religious, though I do not suppose she could give a reason for her faith, and is constantly tolerant of religious differences which she never attempts to comprehend. In the village she is simply adored by men, women, and children alike, though she is not particularly given to what is called “visiting the poor.”

At the same time if there is trouble in any house, no matter of what kind, she goes there straight by instinct, and has none of the dread of emotional scenes which make so many of us cowards in the presence of sorrow and suffering. I do not think she feels any duty about it, but it is as natural and spontaneous for her to go as it is for most of us to desire to keep away. A shrewd woman of the village, a labourer’s wife, whom my mother had seen through a dreadful tragedy a year or two before, once said in reply to a question of mine, “It isn’t as if her ladyship said or did more than any one else—every one was kind to us—but she used to come in and sit with me and look at me, and after a little I used to feel that it was all right.”

She manages the household with less expenditure of trouble than I have ever seen. Our servants never seem to leave us; they are paid what many people would call absurdly high wages, but I do not think that is the attraction. My mother does not see very much of them, and finds fault, when rarely necessary, with a simple directness which I have in vain tried to emulate; but her displeasure is so impersonal that there seems to be no sting in it. It is not that they have failed in their duty to herself, but they have been untrue to the larger duty to which she is herself obedient.

She never seems to labour under any strong sense of the imperative duty of philanthropic activity—indeed it is hard to say how her days are filled—but in her simplicity, her unselfishness, her quiet acceptance of the conditions of life, her tranquillity and her devoted lovingness she seems to me the best Christian I have ever seen, and to come nearest to the ideals of Christ. But, though a large part of her large income is spent in unostentatious benevolence, she would think it preposterous if it were suggested to her that Christianity demanded an absolute sacrifice of worldly possessions. Yet she sets no store on comfort or the evidences of wealth; she simply accepts them, and has a strong instinctive feeling of stewardship.

I cannot help thinking that such women are becoming rarer; and yet it is hard to believe that they can ever have been other than rare.

6

I gratefully acknowledge the constant presence of an element in my life which for want of a better name I will call the sense of beauty. I mean by that the unaccountable thrill of emotion by which one is sometimes surprised, often quite suddenly and unexpectedly; this sense of wonder, which darts upon the mind with an almost physical sensation, seems to come in two different ways. With some, the majority I believe, it originates entirely in personal relations with other human beings and is known as love; with others it arises over a larger region, and is inspired by a sudden perception of some incommunicable beauty in a flower, a scent, a view, a picture, a poem. Those in whom the latter sense predominates are, I think, less apt to be affected by human relationships, but pass through the world in a certain solitary and wistful mood, with perhaps more wide and general sources of happiness but less liable to be stirred to the depths of their being by a friendship or a passion. To take typical examples of such a class I conceive that Wordsworth and William Morris were instances. Wordsworth derived, I believe, his highest inspiration from the solemn dignities of nature, in her most stupendous and majestic forms; while to Morris belonged that power, which amounted in him to positive genius, for seeing beauty in the most homely and simple things.

Beauty and Mystery

I was myself haunted from a very early date by the sense of beauty and mystery, though not for many years could I give it a name; but I have found in my case that it originated as a rule in some minute effect of natural things. I have seen some of the wildest and most astounding natural prospects in Europe; I have climbed high rocky peaks and threaded mountain solitudes, but some overshadowing of horror and awe has robbed emotion of its most intimate joy; and I have always found myself more thrilled by some tranquil vignette—the moon rising through a forest glade, a red sunset between the boughs of pines, the crisping wave of some broken eddy, the “green-dense and dim-delicious” depth of a woodland pool, the weathered gables of an ancient manor, an orchard white with the snows of spring—than I have ever been by the sight of the most solemn mountain-head or the furious breakers of some uncontrolled tide.

Two or three of these sacred sights I may venture to describe, taking them at random out of the treasure-house of memory; two belong to my schooldays. I was a pupil at a big suburban school; the house which we inhabited had once been the villa of a well-known statesman, and had large and dignified grounds, where with certain restrictions, we were allowed to ramble. They were bounded on one side by a high paling, inaccessible to small limbs, and a vague speculation as to what was behind the fence long dwelt with me. One day, however, I found that I could loose a portion of a broken paling, and looking through I saw a quiet place, the tail of a neglected shrubbery; the spot seemed quite unvisited; the laurels grew thickly about, and tall elms gave an austere gloom to the little glade; the ground was pathless, and thickly overgrown with periwinkles, but in the centre were three tiny grave-mounds, the graves, I have since reflected, of dogs, but which I at the time supposed to be the graves of children. I gazed with a singular sense of mystery, and strange dream-pictures rose instinctively in my mind, weaving themselves over the solitary and romantic spot. It is strange how often in dreams and gentle reveries I have visited the place.

The Enchanted Land

The next is a later vision. Near the public school where I was educated lay a forest to which we had free admittance. I found that by hard walking it was just possible to reach a wooded hill which was a conspicuous feature of the distant landscape, but the time at my disposal between two school engagements never sufficed to penetrate farther. From the top of this hill it was possible to get a view of a large tract of forest ground, an open grassy glade, with large trees of towering greenness standing sentinel on either side; the bracken grew luxuriantly in places, and at the end of the glade was a glint of water in the horn of some forest pool. This place was to me a veritable “magic casement”; beyond lay the enchanted land into which I could not penetrate, the blue hills on the horizon seen over the tree-tops. I never dreamt of them as inhabited by human beings like myself, but as some airy region, with leagues of dreaming woods and silent forest spaces. At times a deer would slowly cross the open vale, and stand to sniff the breeze; the very cooing of the doves in their leafy fastnesses had a richer and drowsier sound.

But the home of incommunicable dreams, beyond all others, is to me a certain mill—Grately Mill—that is not many miles from my present home. My mother had an old aunt who lived in a pleasant house in the neighbourhood, and we used to go there when I was a child to spend a few weeks of the early summer.

A little vague lane led to it: a lane that came from nowhere in particular, and took you nowhere; meandering humbly among the pastures wherever it was convenient to them to permit it, like a fainthearted Christian. Hard by was a tall, high-shouldered, gabled farm of red brick, with a bell perched on the roof in a white pavilion of its own. Down the lane on hot summer days we used to walk—my mother and I: my mother whom I revered as a person of unapproachable age and dim experience, though she had been in the schoolroom herself but a year or two before my birth; I trotting by her side with a little fishing-rod in a grey holland case, to fish for perch in the old pond at the Hall.

The lane grew sandier and damper: a rivulet clucked in the ditch, half-hidden in ragged-robin with its tattered finery, and bright varnished ranunculus; the rivulet was a mysterious place enough ever since the day when we found it full of waving clusters of strange dark creatures, more eel than fish, which had all appeared with miraculous unanimity in a single night—lamperns, the village naturalist called them, and told us that in ancient days they were a delicacy; while I, in my childish mind, at once knew that it was this which had gone to the composition of that inexplicable dish, a surfeit of lampreys, as the history had it, of which some greedy monarch died.

Once, too, a bright-coloured eel had been seen at a certain point, who had only just eluded the grasp of hot little fingers. How many times I looked for master eel, expecting to meet him at the same place, and was careful to carry a delightful tin box in my pocket, in which he might travel home in my pocket, and live an honoured life in a basin in the night nursery. Poor eel! I am glad now that he escaped, but then he was only a great opportunity missed—an irreparable regret.

Grately Mill

Then the poor lane, which had been getting more like a water-course every moment, no longer made any pretence, and disappeared into a shallow sheet of clear water—the mill at last! The scene, as I remember it, had a magical charm. On the left, by the side of the lane, rose a crazy footpath of boards and posts with a wooden handrail, and a sluice or two below. Beyond, the deep mill-pool slept, dark and still, all fringed with trees. On the right the stream flowed off among the meadows, disappearing into an arch of greenery; in summer the banks and islets were all overgrown with tall rich plants, comfrey, figwort, water-dock. The graceful willow-herb hung its pink horns; the loosestrife rose in sturdier velvet spires. On the bank stood the shuttered, humming mill, the water-wheel splashing and thundering, like a prisoned giant, in a penthouse of its own. It was a fearful joy to look in and see it rise dripping, huge and black, with the fresh smell of the river water all about it. All the mill was powdered with the dust of grain; the air inside was full of floating specks; the hoppers rattled, and the gear grumbled in the roof, while the flour streamed merrily into the open sack. The miller, a grave preoccupied man, all dusted over, like a plum, with a thin bloom of flour, gave us a grave nod of greeting, which seemed to make us free of the place. I dare say he was a shy mild man, with but little of the small change of the mind at his disposal; but he seemed to me then an austere and statesmanlike person, full to the brim of grave affairs. Beyond the mill, a lane of a more determined character led through arches of elms to the common. And now, on secular days, the interests of the chase took precedence of all else; but there were Sundays in the summer when we walked to attend Grately Church. It seems to me at this lapse of time to have been almost impossibly antique. Ancient yews stood by it, and it had a white boarded spire with a cracked bell. Inside, the single aisleless nave, with ancient oak pews, was much encumbered in one place by a huge hand-organ, with a forest of gold pipes, turned by a wizened man, who opened a little door in the side and inserted his hand at intervals to set the tune. The clergyman, an aged gentleman, wore what was, I suppose, a dark wig, though at the time I imagined it to be merely an agreeable variety on ordinary hair; another pleasant habit he had of slightly smacking his lips, at every little pause, as he read, which gave an air of indescribable gusto to the service:—“Moab—tut—is my washpot—tut—; over Edom—tut—will I cast out my shoe—tut—; upon Philistia—tut—will I triumph.”

Grately Church

In the vestry of the church reposed a curious relic—a pyx, I believe, is the correct name. It was a gilded metal chalice with a top, into which, if my memory serves me, were screwed little soldiers to guard the sacred body; these were loose, and how I coveted them! In the case were certain spikes and branches of crystal, the broken remains, I believe, of a spreading crystal tree which once adorned the top. How far my memory serves me I know not, but I am sure that the relic which may still survive, is a most interesting thing; and I can recollect that when a high dignitary of the Church stayed with us, it was kindly brought over by the clergyman for his inspection, and his surprise was very great.

The Hall lay back from the common, sheltered by great trees. The house itself, a low white building, was on those summer days cool and fragrant. The feature of the place was the great fish-ponds—one lay outside the shrubbery; but another, formerly I believe a monastic stew-pond, was a long rectangle just outside the windows of the drawing-room, and only separated from it by a gravel walk: along part of it ran an ancient red-brick wall. This was our favourite fishing-place; but above it, brooded over by huge chestnuts, lay a deeper and stiller pond, half covered with water-lilies—too sacred and awful a place to be fished in or even visited alone.

Upon the fishing hours I do not love to dwell; I would only say that of such cruelties as attended it I was entirely innocent. I am sure that I never thought of a perch as other than a delightful mechanical thing, who had no grave objection to being hauled up gasping, with his black stripes gleaming, and prickling his red fins, to be presently despatched, and carried home stiff and cold in a little basket.

The tea under the tall trees of the lawn; the admiring inspection of our prey; the stuffed dog in the hall with his foot upon a cricket-ball—all these are part of the dream-pictures; and the whole is invested for me with the purpureal gleams of childhood.

Grately Thirty Years After

The other day I found myself on a bicycle near enough to Grately to make it possible to go there; into the Hall grounds I did not venture, but I struck across the common and went down the lane to the mill. I was almost ashamed of the agitation I felt, but the sight of the common, never visited for nearly thirty years, induced a singular physical distress. It was not that everything had grown smaller, even changed the places that they occupy in my mental picture, but a sort of homesickness seemed to draw tight bands across my heart. What does it mean, this intense local attachment, for us flimsy creatures, snapped at a touch, and with so brief a pilgrimage? A strange thought! The very intensity and depth of the feeling seems to confer on it a right to permanence.

The lane came abruptly to an end by the side of a commonplace, straight-banked, country brook. There were no trees, no water-plants; the road did not dip to the stream, and in front of me lay a yellow brick bridge, with grim iron lattices. Alas! I had mistaken the turn, and must retrace my steps. But stay! what was that squat white house by the waterside? It was indeed the old mill, with its boarded projections swept away, its barns gone, its garden walled with a neat wall. The old high-timbered bridge was down; some generous landlord had gone to great expense, and Grately had a good convenient road, a sensible bridge, and an up-to-date mill. Probably there was not a single person in the parish who did not confess to an improvement.

But who will give me back the tall trees and the silent pool? Who will restore the ancient charm, the delicate mysteries, the gracious dignity of the place? Is beauty a mere trick of grouping, the irradiation of a golden mood, a chance congeries of water and high trees and sunlight? If beauty be industriously hunted from one place by ruthless hands, does she spread her wings and fly? Is the restless, ceaseless effort of nature to restore beauty to the dismal messes made by man, simply broken off and made vain? Or has she leisure to work harder yet in unvisited places, patiently enduring the grasp of the spoiling hand?

It was with something like a sob that I turned away. But of one thing no one can rob me, and that is the picture of Grately Mill, glorified indeed by the patient worship of years, which is locked into some portfolio of the mind, and can be unspread in a moment before the gazing eye.

Egeria

And for one thing I can be grateful—that the still spirit of sweet and secret places, that wayward nymph who comes and goes, with the wind in her hair and the gleam of deep water in her eyes—she to whom we give many a clumsy name—that she first beckoned to me and spoke words in my ear beneath the high elms of Grately Mill. Many times have we met and spoken in secret since, my Egeria and I; many times has she touched my shoulder, and whispered a magic charm. That presence has been often withdrawn from me; but I have but to recall the bridge, the water-plants, the humming mill, the sunlight on the sandy shallows, to feel her hand in mine again.

7

As a boy and a young man I went through the ordinary classical education—private school, public school, and university. I do not think I troubled my head at the time about the philosophical theory or motive of the course; but now, looking back upon it after an interval of twenty years, while my admiration of the theory of it is enhanced, as a lofty and dignified scheme of mental education, I find myself haunted by uneasy doubts as to its practical efficacy. While it seems to me to be for a capable and well-equipped boy with decided literary taste, a noble and refining influence, I begin to fear that for the large majority of youthful English minds it is narrowing, unimproving, and conspicuous for an absence of intellectual enjoyment.

Is it not the experience of most people that little boys are conscientious, duty-loving, interested not so much in the matter of work, but in the zealous performance of it; and that when adolescence begins, they grow indifferent, wearied, even rebellious, until they drift at last into a kind of cynicism about the whole thing—a kind of dumb certainty, that whatever else may be got from work, enjoyment in no form is the result? And is not the moral of this, that the apprenticeship once over and the foundation laid, special tastes should as far as possible be consulted, and subjects simplified, so as to give boys a sense of mastery in something, and interest at all hazards.

Methods of Study

The champions of our classical system defend it on the ground that the accurate training in the subtleties of grammar hardens and fortifies the intelligence, and that the mind is introduced to the masterpieces of ancient literature, and thus encouraged in the formation of correct taste and critical appreciation.

An excellent theory, and I admit at once its value for minds of high and firm intellectual calibre. But how does it actually work out for the majority? In the first place, look at what the study of grammar amounts to—it comes, as a matter of fact, when one remembers the grammar papers which were set in examinations, to be little more than a knowledge of arbitrary, odd and eccentric forms such as a boy seldom if ever meets in the course of his reading. Imagine teaching English on the same theory, and making boys learn that metals have no plural, or that certain fish use the same form in the singular and in the plural—things of which one acquires the knowledge insensibly, and which are absolutely immaterial. Moreover, the quantity of grammatical forms in Latin and Greek are infinitely increased by the immensely larger number of inflexions. Is it useful that boys should have to commit to memory the dual forms in Greek verbs—forms of a repulsive character in themselves, and seldom encountered in books? The result of this method is that the weaker mind is warped and strained. Some few memories of a peculiarly retentive type may acquire these useless facts in a mechanical manner; but it is hardly more valuable than if they were required to commit to memory long lists of nonsense words. Yet in most cases they are doomed to be speedily and completely forgotten—indeed, nothing can ever be really learnt unless a logical connection can be established between the items.

Mastery and Spirit

Then after the dark apprenticeship of grammar comes the next stage—the appreciation of literature; but I diffidently believe here that not ten per cent of the boys who are introduced to the classics have ever the slightest idea that they are in the presence of literature at all. They never approach the point which is essential to a love of literature—the instinctive perception of the intrinsic beauty of majestic and noble words, and still less the splendid associations which grow to be inseparably connected with words, in a language which one really knows and admires.

Method and Spirit

My own belief is that both the method of instruction and the spirit of that instruction are at fault. Like the Presbyterian Liturgy, the system depends far too much on the individuality of the teacher, and throws too great a strain upon his mood. A vigorous, brilliant, lively, humorous, rhetorical man can break through the shackles of construing and parsing, and give the boys the feeling of having been in contact with a larger mind; but in the hands of a dull and uninspiring teacher the system is simply famishing from its portentous aridity. The result, at all events, is that the majority of the boys at our schools never get the idea that they are in the presence of literature at all. They are kept kicking their heels in the dark and cold antechamber of parsing and grammar, and never get a glimpse of the bright gardens within.

What is, after all, the aim of education? I suppose it is twofold: firstly, to make of the mind a bright, keen, and effective instrument, capable of seeing a point, of grappling with a difficulty, of presenting facts or thoughts with clearness and precision. A young man properly educated should be able to detect a fallacy, to correct by acquired clearsightedness a false logical position. He should not be at the mercy of any new theory which may be presented to him in a specious and attractive shape. That is, I suppose, the negative side. Then secondly, he should have a cultivated taste for intellectual things, a power of enjoyment; he should not bow meekly to authority in the matter of literature, and force himself into the admiration of what is prescribed, but he should be possessed of a dignified and wholesome originality; he should have his own taste clearly defined. If his bent is historical, he should be eagerly interested in any masterly presentation of historical theory, whether new or old; if philosophical, he should keep abreast of modern speculation; if purely literary, he should be able to return hour after hour to masterpieces that breathe and burn.

Educational Results

But what is the result of our English education? In one respect admirable; it turns out boys who are courteous, generous, brave, active, and public-spirited; but is it impossible that these qualities should exist with a certain intellectual standard? I remember now, though I did not apply any theory at the time to the phenomenon, that when at school I used dimly to wonder at seeing boys who were all these things—fond of talk, fond of games, devoted to all open-air exercises, conscientious and wholesome-minded, who were at the same time utterly listless in intellectual things—who could not read a book of any kind except the simplest novel, and then only to fill a vacant hour, who could not give a moment’s attention to the presentment of an interesting episode, who were moreover utterly contemptuous of all such things, inclined to think them intolerably tedious and essentially priggish—and yet these were the boys of whom most was made, who were most popular not only with boys but with masters as well, and who, in our little microcosmography were essentially the successful people, to be imitated, followed, and worshipped.

Now if it were certain that the qualities which are developed by an English education would be sacrificed if a higher intellectual standard were aimed at, I should not hesitate to sacrifice the intellectual side. But I do not believe it is necessary; and what is stranger still, I do not believe that most of our educators have any idea that the intellectual side of education is being sacrificed.

I remember once hearing a veteran and successful educator say that he considered a well-educated man was a man whose mind was not at the mercy of the last new book on any ordinary subject. If that is an infallible test, then our public schools may be said to have succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation. The ordinary public-school type of man is not in the least at the mercy of the last new book, because he is careful never to submit himself to the chance of pernicious bias—he does not get so far as to read it.

Educational Aims

At present athletics are so much deferred to, that boys seem to me to be encouraged deliberately to lay their plans as if life ended at thirty. But I believe that schools should aim at producing a type that should develop naturally and equably with the years. What we want to produce is an unselfish, tranquil, contented type, full of generous visions; neither prematurely serious nor incurably frivolous, nor afraid of responsibility, nor morbidly desirous of influence; neither shunning nor courting publicity, but natural, wholesome, truthful, and happy; not afraid of difficulties nor sadly oppressed with a sense of responsibility; fond of activity and yet capable of using and enjoying leisure; not narrow-minded, not viewing everything from the standpoint of a particular town or parish, but patriotic and yet not insular, modern-spirited and yet not despising the past, practical and yet with a sense of spiritual realities.

I think that what is saddest is that the theoretical perfection screens the practical inutility of the thing. If it seems good to the collective wisdom of the country to let education go, and to make a public-school a kind of healthy barrack-life for the physical training of the body, with a certain amount of mental occupation to fill the vacant hours that might otherwise be mischievous—pleasure with a hem of duty—let it be frankly admitted that it is so; but that the education received by boys at our public-schools is now, except in intention, literary—that is the position which I entirely deny.

Personally I had a certain feeble taste for literature. I read in a slipshod way a good deal of English poetry, memoirs, literary history, and essays, but my reading was utterly amateurish and unguided. I even had some slight preferences in style, but I could not have given a reason for my preference; I could not write an English essay—I had no idea of arrangement. I had never been told to “let the bones show;” I had no sense of proportion, and considered that anything which I happened to have in my own mind was relevant to any subject about which I was writing. I had never learnt to see the point or to insist upon the essential.

The Classics

Neither do I think that I can claim to have had any particular love for the classics; but I was blest with a pictorial mind, and though much of my classical reading was a mere weariness to me, I was cheered at intervals by a sudden romantic glimpse of some scene or other that seized me with a vivid reality. The Odyssey and the Æneid were rich in these surprises; for the talk of Gods, indeed, I had nothing but bewildered contempt; but such a scene as that of Laertes in his patched gaiters, fumbling with a young tree on his upland farm, at once seized tyrannically upon my fancy. Catullus, Horace, even Martial, gave me occasional food for the imagination; and all at once it seemed worth while to traverse the arid leagues, or to wade, as Tennyson said, in a sea of glue, for these divine moments.

One such scene that affected my fancy I will describe in greater detail; and let it stand as a specimen. It was in the third Æneid; we were sitting in a dusty class-room, the gas flaring. The lesson proceeded slowly and wearily, with a thin trickle of exposition from the desk, emanating from a master who was evidently as sick of the whole business as ourselves.

Andromache, widow of Hector, after a forced union with Neoptolemus, becomes the bride of Helenus, Hector’s brother. Helenus on the death of Pyrrhus becomes his successor in the chieftainship, and Andromache is once more a queen. She builds a rustic altar, an excuse for lamentation, and there bewails the memory of her first lord. I was reflecting that she must have made but a dreary wife for Helenus, when in a moment the scene was changed. Æneas, it will be remembered, comes on her in her orisons, with his troop of warriors behind him, and is greeted by the terrified queen, who believes him to be an apparition, with a wild and artless question ending a burst of passionate grief: “If you come from the world of spirits,” she says, “Hector ubi est?” It is one of those sudden turns that show the ineffable genius of Virgil.

I saw in a moment a clearing in a wood of beeches; one great tree stood out from the rest. Half hidden in the foliage stood a tall stone pillar, supporting a mouldering urn. Close beside this was a stone alcove, with a little altar beneath it. In the alcove stood a silent listening statue with downcast head. From the altar went up a little smoke; the queen herself, a slender figure, clad in black, with pale worn face and fragile hands, bent in prayer. By her side were two maidens, also in the deepest black, a priest in stiff vestments, and a boy bearing a box of incense.

Virgil

A slight noise falls on the ear of Andromache; she turns, and there at the edge of a green forest path, lit by the red light of a low smouldering sun, stands the figure of a warrior, his arms rusty and dark, his mailed feet sunk in the turf, leaning on his spear. His face is pale and heavily lined, worn with ungentle experience, and lit by a strange light of recognition. His pale forked beard falls on his breast; behind him a mist of spears.

This was the scene; very rococo, no doubt, and romantic, but so intensely real, so glowing, that I could see the pale-stemmed beeches; and below, through a gap, low fantastic hills and a wan river winding in the plain. I could see the white set face of Æneas, the dark-eyed glance of the queen, the frightened silence of the worshippers.

8

At Cambridge things were not very different. I was starved intellectually by the meagre academical system. I took up the Classical Tripos, and read, with translations, in the loosest style imaginable, great masses of classical literature, caring little about the subject matter, seldom reading the notes, with no knowledge of history, archæology, or philosophy, and even strangely ignorant of idiom. I received no guidance in these matters; my attendance at lectures was not insisted upon; and the composition lecturers, though conscientious, were not inspiring men. My tutor did, it must be confessed, make some attempt to influence my reading, urging me to lay down a regular plan, and even recommending books and editions. But I was too dilatory to carry it out; and though I find that in one Long Vacation I read through the Odyssey, the Æneid, and the whole of Aristotle’s Ethics, yet they left little or no impression on my mind. I did indeed drift into a First Class, but this was merely due to familiarity with, rather than knowledge of, the Classics; and my ignorance of the commonest classical rules was phenomenal.

Cambridge Life

But I did derive immense intellectual stimulus from my Cambridge life, though little from the prescribed course of study; for I belonged to a little society that met weekly, and read papers on literary and ethical subjects, prolonging a serious, if fitful, discussion late into the night. I read a great deal of English in a sketchy way, and even wrote both poetry and fiction; but I left Cambridge a thoroughly uneducated man, without an idea of literary method, and contemning accuracy and precision in favour of brilliant and heady writing. The initial impulse to interest in literature was certainly instinctive in me; but I maintain that not only did that interest never receive encouragement from the professed educators under whose influence I passed, but that I was not even professionally trained in the matter; that solidity and accuracy were never insisted upon; and that the definiteness, which at least education is capable of communicating, was either never imparted by mental processes, or that I successfully resisted the imparting of it—indeed, never knew that any attempt was being made to teach me the value or necessity of it.

9

I had a religious bringing-up. I was made familiar with the Bible and the offices of religion; only the natural piety was wanting. I am quite certain I had no sense of religion as a child—I do not think I had any morality. Like many children, I was ruled by associations rather than by principles. I was sensitive to disapproval; and being timid by nature, I was averse to being found out; being moreover lacking in vitality, I seldom experienced the sensation of being brought face to face with temptation—rebellion, anger, and sensual impulse were unknown to me; but while I was innocent, I was unconscientious and deceitful, not so much deliberately as instinctively.

The sense of religion I take to be, in its simplest definition, the consciousness of the presence of the Divine Being, and the practice of religion to be the maintenance of conscious union or communion with the Divine. These were entirely lacking to me. I accepted the fact of God’s existence as I accepted the facts of history and geography. But my conception of God, if I may speak plainly and without profanity, was derived from the Old Testament, and was destitute of attractiveness. I conceived of Him as old, vindictive, unmerciful, occupied in tedious matters, hostile to all gaiety and juvenility; totally uninterested in the human race, except in so far that He regarded their transgressions with morbid asperity and a kind of gloomy satisfaction, as giving Him an opportunity of exercising coercive discipline. He was never represented to me as the Giver of the simple joys of life—of light and warmth, of food and sleep, as the Creator of curious and sweet-smelling flowers, of aromatic shrubs, of waving trees, of horned animals and extravagant insects. Considering how entirely creatures of sense children are, it has seemed to me since that it would be well if their simplest pleasures, the material surroundings of their lives, were connected with the idea of God—if they felt that what they enjoyed was sent by Him; if it were said of a toy that “God sends you this;” or of some domestic festivity that “God hopes that you will be happy to-day,”—it appears to me that we should have less of that dreary philosophy which connects “God’s will” only with moments of bereavement and suffering. If we could only feel with Job, that God, who sends us so much that is sweet and wholesome, has equally the right to send us what is evil, we could early grow to recognise that, when the greater part of our lives is made up of what is desirable or interesting, and when we cling to life and the hope of happiness with so unerring an instinct, it is probable, nay, certain, that our afflictions must be ultimately intended to minister to the fulness of joy.

Religion

Certainly religious practices, though I enjoyed them in many ways, had no effect on conduct; indeed, I never thought of them as having any concern with conduct. Religious services never seemed to me in childhood to be solemnities designed for the hallowing of life, or indeed as having any power to do so, but merely as part of the framework of duty, as ceremonies out of which it was possible to derive a certain amount of interest and satisfaction.

Church was always a pleasure to me; I liked the mise-en-scène, the timbered roof, the fallen day, the stained glass, the stone pillars, the comfortable pew, the rubricated prayer-book, the music, the movements of the minister—these all had a definite æsthetic effect upon me; moreover, it was a pleasure to note, with the unshrinking gaze of childhood, the various delightful peculiarities of members of the congregation: the old man with apple-red cheeks, in his smock-frock, who came with rigid, creaking boots to his place; the sexton, with his goat-like beard; the solicitor, who emitted sounds in the hymns like the lowing of a cow; the throaty tenor, who had but one vowel for all; the dowager in purple silk, who sat through the Psalms and inspected her prayer-book through a gold eye-glass as though she were examining some natural curiosity. All these were, in childish parlance, “so funny.” And Church was thus a place to which I went willingly and joyfully; the activity of my observation saved me from the tedium with which so many children regard it.

Religious Sentiment

This vacuous æstheticism in the region of religion continued with me through my school days. Of purpose and principle there was no trace. I do indeed remember one matter in which I had recourse to prayer. At my private school, a big suburban establishment, I was thrust into a large dormitory, a shrinking and bewildered atom, fresh from the privacies and loving attentions of the nursery, and required to undress and go to bed before the eyes of fifty boys. It was a rude introduction to the world, and it is strange to reflect upon the helpless despair with which a little soul can be filled under circumstances which to maturer thoughts appear almost idyllic. But while I crouched miserably upon my bed, as I prepared to slip between the sheets—of which the hard texture alone dismayed me—I was struck by a shoe, mischievously, but not brutally thrown by a bigger boy some yards away. Is it amusing or pathetic to reflect that night after night I prayed that this might not be repeated, using a suffrage of the Litany about our persecutors and slanderers, which seemed to me dismally appropriate?

At the public school to which I was shortly transferred, where I enjoyed a tranquil and uneventful existence, religion was still a sentiment. Being one of the older foundations we had a paid choir, and the musical service was a real delight to me. I loved the dark roof and the thunders of the organ; even now I can recollect the thrill with which I looked day after day at the pure lines of the Tudor building, the innumerable clustered shafts that ran from pavement to roof. I cared little for the archæology and history of the place, but the grace of antiquity, the walls of mellow brick, the stone-crop that dripped in purple tufts among the mouldering stones of the buttress, the very dust that clung to the rafters of the ancient refectory—all these I noted with secret thrills of delight.

Still no sense of reality touched me; life was but a moving pageant, in which I played as slight a part as I could contrive to play. I was inoffensive; my work was easy to me. I had some congenial friends, and dreamed away the weeks in a gentle indolence set in a framework of unengrossing duties.

Pleasures of Ritual

About my sixteenth year I made friends with a high-church curate whom I met in the holidays, who was indeed distantly related to me; he was attached to a large London church, which existed mainly for ornate services, and I used to go up from school occasionally to see him, and even spent a few days in his house at the beginning or end of the holidays. Looking back, he seems to me now to have been a somewhat inert and sentimental person, but I acquired from him a real love of liturgical things, wrote out with my own hand a book of Hours, carefully rubricated—though I do not recollect that I often used it—and became more ceremonial than ever. I had long settled that I was to take Orders, and I well recollect the thrill with which on one of these visits I saw my friend ascend the high stone pulpit of the tall church, with flaring lights, in a hood of a strange pattern, which he assured me was the antique shape. The sermon was, I even now recollect, deplorable both in language and thought, but that seemed to me a matter of entire indifference; the central fact was that he stood there vested with due solemnity, and made rhetorical motions with an easy grace.

A Benediction

At this time, too, at school, I took to frequenting the service of the cathedral in the town whenever I was able, and became a familiar figure to vergers and clergy. I have no doubt that were I to be made a bishop, this fact would be cited as an instance of early piety, but the truth was that it was, so to speak, a mere amusement. I can honestly say that it had no sort of effect on my life, which ran indolently on, side by side with the ritual preoccupation, unaffected by it, and indeed totally distinct from it. My confirmation came in the middle of these diversions; the solid and careful preparation that I received I looked upon as so much tedious lecturing to be decorously borne, and beside a dim pleasure in the ceremony, I do not think it had any influence of a practical kind. Once, indeed, there did pass a breath of vital truth over my placid and self-satisfied life, like a breeze over still water. There came to stay with us in the holidays an elderly clergyman, a friend of my mother’s, a London rector, whose whole life was sincerely given to helping souls to the light, and who had escaped by some exquisite lucidity of soul the self-consciousness—too often, alas, the outcome of the adulation which is the shadow of holy influence. He had the gift of talking simply and sweetly about spiritual things—indeed nothing else interested him; conversation about books or politics he listened to with a gentle urbanity of tolerance; yet when he talked himself, he never dogmatised, but appealed with a wistful smile to his hearers to confirm the experiences which he related. Me, though an awkward boy, he treated with the most winning deference, and on the morning of his departure asked me with delightful grace to accompany him on a short walk, and opened to me the thought of the hallowing presence of Christ in daily life. It seems to me now that he was inviting my confidence, but I had none to give him; so with a memorable solemnity he bade me, if I ever needed help in spiritual things, to come freely to him; I remember that he did so without any sense of patronage, but as an older disciple, wrestling with the same difficulties, and only a little further ahead in the vale of life. Lastly he took me to his room, knelt down beside me, and prayed with exquisite simplicity and affection that I might be enriched with the knowledge of Christ, and then laid his hand upon my head with a loving benediction. For days and even weeks that talk and that benediction dwelt with me; but the time had not come, and I was to be led through darker waters; and though I prayed for many days intensely that some revelation of truth might come to me, yet the seed had fallen on shallow soil, and was soon scorched up again by the genial current of my daily life.

I think, though I say this with sadness, that he represented religion as too much a withdrawal from life for one so young, and did not make it clear to me that my merriment, my joys, my interests, and my ambitions might be hallowed and invigorated. He had himself subordinated life and character so completely to one end, and thrown aside (if he had ever possessed them) the dear prejudices and fiery interests of individuality, that I doubt if he could have thrown his imagination swiftly enough back into all the energetic hopes, the engrossing beckonings of opening manhood.

10

The rest of my school life passed without any important change of view. I became successful in games, popular, active-minded. I won a scholarship at Cambridge with disastrous ease.

Then Cambridge life opened before me. I speak elsewhere of my intellectual and social life there, and will pass on to the next event of importance in my religious development.

My life had become almost purely selfish. I was not very ambitious of academical honours, though I meant to secure a modest first-class; but I was intensely eager for both social and literary distinction, and submitted myself to the full to the dreamful beauty of my surroundings, and the delicious thrill of artistic pleasures.

I have often thought how strangely and secretly the crucial moment, the most agonising crisis of my life drifted upon me. I say deliberately that, looking back over my forty years of life, no day was so fraught for me with fate, no hour so big with doomful issues, as that day which dawned so simply and sped past with such familiar ease to the destined hour—that moment which waved me, led by sociable curiosity, into the darkness of suffering and agony. A new birth indeed! The current of my days fell, as it were, with suddenness, unexpected, unguessed at, into the weltering gulf of despair; that hour turned me in an instant from a careless boy into a troubled man. And yet how easily it might have been otherwise—no, I dare not say that.

The Evangelist

It had been like any other day. I had been to the dreary morning service, read huskily by a few shivering mortals in the chilly chapel; I had worked, walked in the afternoon with a friend, and we had talked of our plans—all we meant to do and be. After hall, I went to have some coffee in the rooms of a mild and amiable youth, now a church dignitary in the Colonies. I sat, I remember, on a deep sofa, which I afterwards bought and still possess. Our host carelessly said that a great Revivalist was to address a meeting that night. Some one suggested that we should go. I laughingly assented. The meeting was held in a hall in a side street; we went smiling and talking, and took our places in a crowded room. The first item was the appearance of an assistant, who accompanied the evangelist as a sort of precentor—an immense bilious man, with black hair, and eyes surrounded by flaccid, pendent, baggy wrinkles—who came forward with an unctuous gesture, and took his place at a small harmonium, placed so near the front of the platform that it looked as if both player and instrument must inevitably topple over; it was inexpressibly ludicrous to behold. Rolling his eyes in an affected manner, he touched a few simple cords, and then a marvellous transformation came over the room. In a sweet, powerful voice, with an exquisite simplicity combined with irresistible emotion, he sang “There were Ninety-and-Nine.” The man was transfigured. A deathly hush came over the room, and I felt my eyes fill with tears; his physical repulsiveness slipped from him, and left a sincere impulsive Christian, whose simple music spoke straight to the heart.

Then the preacher himself—a heavy-looking, commonplace man, with a sturdy figure and no grace of look or gesture—stepped forward. I have no recollection how he began, but he had not spoken half-a-dozen sentences before I felt as though he and I were alone in the world. The details of that speech have gone from me. After a scathing and indignant invective on sin, he turned to draw a picture of the hollow, drifting life, with feeble, mundane ambitions—utterly selfish, giving no service, making no sacrifice, tasting the moment, gliding feebly down the stream of time to the roaring cataract of death. Every word he said burnt into my soul. He seemed to me to probe the secrets of my innermost heart; to be analysing, as it were, before the Judge of the world, the arid and pitiful constituents of my most secret thought. I did not think I could have heard him out ... his words fell on me like the stabs of a knife. Then he made a sudden pause, and in a peroration of incredible dignity and pathos he drew us to the feet of the crucified Saviour, showed us the bleeding hand and the dimmed eye, and the infinite heart behind. “Just accept Him,” he cried; “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, you may be His—nestling in His arms—with the burden of sin and selfishness resting at His feet.”

Wounded Deep

Even as he spoke, pierced as I was to the heart by contrition and anguish, I knew that this was not for me.... He invited all who would be Christ’s to wait and plead with him. Many men—even, I was surprised to see, a careless, cynical companion of my own—crowded to the platform, but I went out into the night, like one dizzied with a sudden blow. I was joined, I remember, by a tutor of my college, who praised the eloquence of the address, and was surprised to find me so little responsive; but my only idea was to escape and be alone: I felt like a wounded creature, who must crawl into solitude. I went to my room, and after long and agonising prayers for light, an intolerable weariness fell on me, and I slept.

I awoke at some dim hour of the night in the clutch of insupportable fear; let me say at once that with the miserable weeks that followed there was mingled much of physical and nervous suffering, far more, indeed, than I then knew, or was permitted to know. I had been reading hard, and throwing myself with unaccustomed energy into a hundred new ideas and speculations. I had had a few weeks before a sudden attack of sleeplessness, which should have warned me of overstrain. But now every nervous misery known to man beset me—intolerable depression, spectral remorse, nocturnal terrors. My work was neglected. I read the Bible incessantly, and prayed for the hour together. Sometimes my depression would leave me for a few hours, like a cat playing with a mouse, and leap upon me like an evil spirit in the middle of some social gathering or harmless distraction, striking the word from my lips and the smile from my face.

For some weeks this lasted, and I think I was nearly mad. Two strange facts I will record. One day, beside myself with agitation, seeing no way out—for my prayers seemed to batter, as it were, like waves against a stony and obdurate cliff, and no hope or comfort ever slid into my soul—I wrote two letters: one to an eminent Roman Catholic, in whose sermons I had found some encouragement, and one to the elder friend I have above spoken of. In two days I received the answers. That from the Romanist hard, irritated, and bewildered—my only way was to submit myself to true direction, and he did not see that I had any intention of doing this; that it was obvious that I was being plagued for some sin which I had not ventured to open to him. I burnt the letter with a hopeless shudder. The other from my old friend, appointing a time to meet me, and saying that he understood, and that my prayers would avail.

I went soon after to see him, in a dark house in a London square. He heard me with the utmost patience, bade me believe that I was not alone in my experience; that in many a life there was—there must be—some root of bitterness that must flower before the true seed could be sown, and adding many other manly and tender things.

Liberty

He gave me certain directions, and though I will confess that I could not follow them for long—the soul must find her own path, I think, among the crags—yet he led me into a calmer, quieter, more tranquil frame of mind; he taught me that I must not expect to find the way all at once, that long coldness and habitual self-deceit must be slowly purged away. But I can never forget the infinite gratitude I owe him for the loving and strenuous way in which he brought me out into a place of liberty with the tenderness of a true father in God.

11

Thus rudely awakened to the paramount necessity of embracing a faith, bowing to a principle, obeying a gentle force which should sustain and control the soul, I flung myself for a time with ardour into theological reading, my end not erudition, but to drink at the source of life. Is it arrogant to say that I passed through a painful period of disillusionment? all round the pure well I found traces of strife and bitterness. I cast no doubt on the sincerity and zeal of those who had preceded me; but not content with drinking, and finding their eyes enlightened, they had stamped the margin of the pool into the mire, and the waters rose turbid and strife-stained to the lip. Some, like cattle on a summer evening, seemed to stand and brood within the pool itself, careless if they fouled the waters; others had built themselves booths on the margin, and sold the precious draughts in vessels of their own, enraged that any should desire the authentic stream. There was, it seemed, but little room for the wayfarer; and the very standing ground was encumbered with impotent folk.

Discerning the Faith

Not to strain a metaphor, I found that the commentators obscured rather than assisted. What I desired was to realise the character, to divine the inner thoughts of Jesus, to be fired by the impetuous eloquence of Paul, to be strengthened by the ardent simplicity of John. These critics, men of incredible diligence and patience, seemed to me to make a fence about the law, and to wrap the form I wished to see in innumerable vestments of curious design. Readers of the Protagoras of Plato will remember how the great sophist spoke from the centre of a mass of rugs and coverlets, among which, for his delectation, he lay, while the humming of his voice filled the arches of the cloister with a heavy burden of sound. I found myself in the same position as the disciples of Protagoras; the voice that I longed to hear, spoke, but it had to penetrate through the wrappings and veils which these men, in their zeal for service, had in mistaken reverence flung about the lively oracle.

A wise man said to me not long ago that the fault of teaching nowadays was that knowledge was all coined into counters; and that the desire of learners seemed to be not to possess themselves of the ore, not to strengthen and toughen the mind by the pursuit, but to possess themselves of as many of these tokens as possible, and to hand them on unchanged and unchangeable to those who came to learn of themselves.

This was my difficulty; the shelves teemed with books, the lecturers cried aloud in every College court, like the jackdaws that cawed and clanged about the venerable towers; and for a period I flew with notebook and pen from lecture to lecture, entering admirable maxims, acute verbal distinctions, ingenious parallels in my poor pages. At home I turned through book after book, and imbued myself in the learning of the schools, dreaming that, though the rind was tough, the precious morsels lay succulent within.

In this conceit of knowledge I was led to leave my College and to plunge into practical life; what my work was shall presently be related, but I will own that it was a relief. I had begun to feel that though I had learnt the use of the tools, I was no nearer finding the precious metal of which I was in search.

The further development of my faith after this cannot be told in detail, but it may be briefly sketched, after a life of some intellectual activity, not without practical employment, which has now extended over many years.

The Father

I began, I think, very far from Christ. The only vital faith that I had at first was an intense instinctive belief in the absolute power, the infinite energies, of the Father; to me he was not only Almighty, as our weak word phrases it, a Being who could, if he would, exert His power, but παντοκρατῶρ—all-conquering, all-subduing. I was led, by a process of mathematical certainty, to see that if the Father was anywhere, He was everywhere; that if He made us and bade us be, He was responsible for the smallest and most sordid details of our life and thought, as well as for the noblest and highest. It cannot indeed be otherwise; every thought and action springs from some cause, in many cases referable to events which took place in lives outside of and anterior to our own. In any case in which a man seems to enjoy the faculty of choice, his choice is in reality determined by a number of previous causes; given all the data, his action could be inevitably predicted. Thus I gradually realised that sin in the moral world, and disease in the physical, are each of them some manifestation of the Eternal Will. If He gives to me the joy of life, the energy of action, did He not give it to the subtle fungus, to the venomous bacteria which, once established in our bodies, are known by the names of cancer and fever? Why all life should be this uneasy battle I know not; but if we can predicate consciousness of any kind to these strange rudiments, the living slime of the pit, is it irreverent to say that faith may play a part in their work as well? When the health-giving medicine pours along our veins, what does it mean but that everywhere it leaves destruction behind it, and that the organisms of disease which have, with delighted zest, been triumphing in their chosen dwelling and rioting in the instinctive joy of life, sadly and mutely resign the energy that animates them, or sink into sleep. It is all a balance, a strife, a battle. Why such striving and fighting, such uneasy victory and deep unrest should be the Father’s will for all His creatures, I know not; but that it is a condition, a law of His own mind, I can reverently believe. When we sing the Benedicite, which I for one do with all my heart, we must be conscious that it is only a selection, after all, of phenomena that are impressive, delightful, or useful to ourselves. Nothing that we call, God forgive us, noxious, finds a place there. St. Francis, indeed, went further, and praised God for “our sister the Death of the Body,” but in the larger Benedicite of the universe, which is heard by the ear of God, the fever and the pestilence, the cobra and the graveyard worm utter their voices too; and who shall say that the Father hears them not?

The Joy of the World

If one believes that happiness is inch by inch diminishing, that it is all a losing fight, then it must be granted that we have no refuge but in a Stoic hardening of the heart; but when we look at life and see the huge preponderance of joy over pain—such tracts of healthy energy, sweet duty, quiet movement—indeed when we see, as we often do, the touching spectacle of hope and joy again and again triumphant over weakness and weariness; when we see such unselfishness abroad, such ardent desire to lighten the loads of others and to bear their burdens; then it is faithless indeed if we allow ourselves to believe that the Father has any end in view but the ultimate happiness of all the innumerable units, which He endows with independent energies, and which, one by one, after their short taste of this beautiful and exquisite world, resign their powers again, often so gladly, into His hand.

Our Insignificance

But the fault, if I may so phrase it, of this faith, is the vastness of the conception to which it opens the mind. When I contemplate this earth with its continents and islands, its mountains and plains, all stored with histories of life and death, the bones of dead monsters, the shattered hulks of time; the vast briny ocean with all the mysterious life that stirs beneath the heaving crests; when I realise that even this world, with all its infinite records of life, is but a speck in the heavens, and that every one of the suns of space may be surrounded with the same train of satellites, in which some tumultuous drama of life may be, nay, must be enacting itself—that even on the fiery orbs themselves some appalling Titan forms may be putting forth their prodigious energies, suffering and dying—the mind of man reels before the thought;—and yet all is in the mind of God. The consciousness of the microscopic minuteness of my own life and energies, which yet are all in all to me, becomes crushing and paralysing in the light of such a thought. It seems impossible to believe, in the presence of such a spectacle, that the single life can have any definite importance, and the temptation comes to resign all effort, to swim on the stream, just planning life to be as easy and as pleasant as possible, before one sinks into the abyss.

12

From such a paralysis of thought and life two beliefs have saved me.

The Master

First, it may be confessed, came the belief in the Spirit of God, the thought of inner holiness, not born from any contemplation of the world around, which seems indeed to point to far different ideals. Yet as true and truer than the bewildering example of nature is the inner voice which speaks, after the wind and storm, in the silent solitudes of the soul. That this voice exists and is heard can admit of no tangible demonstration; each must speak for himself; but experience forbids me to doubt that there is something which contradicts the seduction of appetite, something which calls, as it were, a flush to the face of the soul at the thought of triumphs of sense, a voice that without being derisive or harsh, yet has a terrible and instantaneous severity; and wields a mental scourge, the blows of which are no less fearful to receive because they are accompanied with no physical disaster. To recognise this voice as the very voice and word of the Father to sentient souls, is the inevitable result of experience and thought.

Then came the triumphant belief, weak at first, but taking slow shape, that the attitude of the soul to its Maker can be something more than a distant reverence, an overpowering awe, a humble worship; the belief, the certainty that it can be, as it were, a personal link—that we can indeed hold converse with God, speak with Him, call upon Him, put to use a human phrase, our hand in His, only desiring to be led according to His will.

Then came the further step; after some study of the systems of other teachers of humanity, after a desire to find in the great redeemers of mankind, in Buddha, Socrates, Mahomet, Confucius, Shakespeare, the secret of self-conquest, of reconciliation, the knowledge slowly dawns upon the mind that in Jesus of Galilee alone we are in the presence of something which enlightens man not from within but from without. The other great teachers of humanity seem to have looked upon the world and into their own hearts, and deduced from thence, by flashes of indescribable genius, some order out of the chaos, some wise and temperate scheme, but with Jesus—though I long resisted the conviction—it is different. He comes, not as a man speaking by observation and thought, but as a visitant from some secret place, who knows the truth rather than guesses at it. I need not say that his reporters, the Gospel writers, had but an imperfect conception of His majesty. His ineffable greatness—it could not well be otherwise; the mystery rather is that with such simple views of life, such elementary conceptions of the scheme of things, they yet gave so much of the stupendous truth, and revealed Jesus in his words and acts as the Divine Man, who spoke to man not by spiritual influences but by the very authentic utterance of God. Such teaching as the parables, such scenes as the raising of Lazarus, or the midday talk by the wayside well of Sychar, emerge from all art and history with a dignity that lays no claim to the majesty that they win; and as the tragedy darkens and thickens to its close, such scenes as the trial, recorded by St. John, and the sacred death, bring home to the mind the fact that no mere humanity could bear itself with such gentle and tranquil dignity, such intense and yet such unselfish suffering as were manifested in the Son of Man.

The Return

And so, as the traveller goes out and wanders through the cities of men, among stately palaces, among the glories of art, or climbs among the aching solitudes of lonely mountains, or feasts his eyes upon green isles floating in sapphire seas, and returns to find that the old strait dwelling-place, the simple duties of life, the familiar friends, homely though they be, are the true anchors of the spirit; so, after a weary pilgrimage, the soul comes back, with glad relief, with wistful tenderness, to the old beliefs of childhood, which, in its pride and stubbornness, it cast aside, and rejected as weak and inadequate and faded; finds after infinite trouble and weariness that it has but learnt afresh what it knew; and that though the wanderer has ransacked the world, digged and drunk strange waters, trafficked for foreign merchandise, yet the Pearl of Price, the White Stone is hidden after all in his own garden-ground, and inscribed with his own new name.

13

I need not enter very closely into the period of my life which followed the university. After a good deal of hesitation and uncertainty I decided to enter for the Home Civil Service, and obtained a post in a subordinate office. The work I found not wholly uninteresting, but it needs no special record here. I acquired the knowledge of how to conduct business, a certain practical power of foreseeing contingencies, a certain acquaintance with legal procedure, and some knowledge of human nature in its official aspect.

Intellectually and morally this period of my life was rather stagnant. I had been through a good deal of excitement, of mental and moral malady, of general bouleversement. Nature exacted a certain amount of quiescence, melancholy quiescence for the most part, because I felt myself singularly without energy to carry out my hopes and schemes, and at the same time it seemed that time was ebbing away purposelessly, and that I was not driving, so to speak, any piles in the fluid and oozy substratum of ideas on which my life seemed built. To revel in metaphors, I was like a snake which has with a great strain bolted a quadruped, and needs a long space of uneasy and difficult digestion. But at the time I did not see this; I only thought I was losing time: I felt with Milton—

“How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth,

Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year.”

But beset as I was by the sublime impatience of youth, I had not serenity enough to follow out the thoughts which Milton works out in the rest of the sonnet.

Literary Work

At the same time, so far as literary work went, to which I felt greatly drawn, I was not so impatient. I wrote a great deal for my private amusement, and to practise facility of expression, but with little idea of hurried publication. A story which I sent to a well-known editor was courteously returned to me, with a letter in which he stated that he had read my work carefully, and that he felt it a duty to tell me that it was “sauce without meat.” This kind and wholesome advice made a great difference to me; I determined that I would attempt to live a little before I indulged in baseless generalisation, or lectured other people on the art of life. I soon gained great facility in writing, and developed a theory, which I have ever since had no reason to doubt, that performance is simply a matter of the intensity of desire. If one only wants enough to complete a definite piece of work, be it poem, essay, story, or some far more definite and prosaic task, I have found that it gets itself done in spite of the insistent pressure of other businesses and the deadening monotony of heavy routine, simply because one goes back to it with delight, schemes to clear time for it, waits for it round corners, and loses no time in spurring and whipping the mind to work, which is necessary in the case of less attractive tasks. The moment that there comes a leisurely gap, the mind closes on the beloved work like a limpet; when this happens day after day and week after week, the accumulations become prodigious.

I thus felt gradually more and more, that when the magnum opus did present itself to be done, I should probably be able to carry it through; and meanwhile I had sufficient self-respect, although I suffered twinges of thwarted ambition, not to force my crude theories, my scrambling prose, or my faltering verse upon the world.

London

Meanwhile I lived a lonely sort of life, with two or three close intimates. I never really cared for London, but it is at the same time idle to deny its fascination. In the first place it is full from day to day of prodigious, astounding, unexpected beauties—sometimes beauty on a noble scale, in the grand style, such as when the sunset shakes its hair among ragged clouds, and the endless leagues of house-roofs and the fronts of town palaces dwindle into a far-off steely horizon-line under the huge and wild expanse of sky. Sometimes it is the smaller, but no less alluring beauty of subtle atmospherical effects; and so conventional is the human appreciation of beauty that the constant presence, in these London pictures, of straight framing lines, contributed by house-front and street-end, is an aid to the imagination. Again, there is the beauty of contrasts; the vignettes afforded by the sudden blossoming of rustic flowers and shrubs in unexpected places; the rustle of green leaves at the end of a monotonous street. And then, apart from natural beauty, there is the vast, absorbing, incredible pageant of humanity, full of pathos, of wistfulness, and of sweetness. But of this I can say but little; for it always moved me, and moves me yet, with a sort of horror. I think it was always to me a spectacular interest; I never felt one with the human beings whom I watched, or even in the same boat, so to speak, with them; the contemplation of the fact that I am one of so many millions has been to me a humiliating rather than an inspiring thought; it dashes the pleasures of individuality; it arraigns the soul before a dark and inflexible bar. Passing daily through London, there is little possibility in the case of an imaginative man for hopeful expansion of the heart, little ground for anything but an acquiescent acceptance. Under these conditions it is too rudely brought home to me to be wholesome, how ineffective, undistinguished, typical, minute, uninteresting any one human being is after all: and though the sight of humanity in every form is attractive, bewildering, painfully interesting, thrilling, and astounding—though one finds unexpected beauty and goodness everywhere—yet I recognise that city life had a deadening effect on my consciousness, and hindered rather than helped the development of thought and life.

The Artist

Still, in other ways this period was most valuable—it made me practical instead of fanciful; alert instead of dreamy; it made me feel what I had never known before, the necessity for grasping the exact point of a matter, and not losing oneself among side issues. It helped me out of the entirely amateurish condition of mind into which I had been drifting—and, moreover, it taught me one thing which I had never realised, a lesson for which I am profoundly grateful, namely that literature and art play a very small part in the lives of the majority of people; that most men have no sort of an idea that they are serious matters, but look upon them as more or less graceful amusements; that in such regions they have no power of criticism, and no judgment; but that these are not nearly such serious defects as the defect of vision which the artist and the man of letters suffer from and encourage—the defect, I mean, of treating artistic ideals as matters of pre-eminent national, even of moral importance. They must be content to range themselves frankly with other craftsmen; they may sustain themselves by thinking that they may help, a very little, to ameliorate conditions, to elevate the tone of morality and thought, to provide sources of recreation, to strengthen the sense of beauty; but they must remember that they cannot hope to belong to the primal and elemental things of life. Not till the primal needs are satisfied does the work of the poet and artist begin—“After the banquet, the minstrel.”

The poet and the artist too often live, like the Lady of Shalott, weaving a magic web of fair and rich colour, but dealing not with life itself, and not even with life viewed ipsis oculis, but in the magic mirror. The Lady of Shalott is doubly secluded from the world; she does not mingle with it, she does not even see it; so the writer sometimes does not even see the life which he describes, but draws his knowledge secondhand, through books and bookish secluded talk. I do not think that I under-rate the artistic vocation; but it is only one of many, and, though different in kind, certainly not superior to the vocations of those who do the practical work of the world.

From this dangerous heresy I was saved just at the moment when it was waiting to seize upon me, and at a time when a man’s convictions are apt to settle themselves for life, by contact with the prosaic, straightforward and commonplace world.

At one time I saw a certain amount of society; my father’s old friends were very kind to me, and I was thus introduced to what is a far more interesting circle of society than the circle which would rank itself highest, and which spends an amount of serious toil in the search of amusement, with results which to an outsider appear to be unsatisfactory. The circle to which I gained admittance was the official set—men who had definite and interesting work in the world—barristers, government officials, politicians and the like, men versed in affairs, and with a hard and definite knowledge of what was really going on. Here I learnt how different is the actual movement of politics from the reflection of it which appears in the papers, which often definitely conceals the truth from the public.

Diversions

My amusements at this period were of the mildest character; I spent Sundays in the summer months at Golden End; Sundays in the winter as a rule at my lodgings; and devoted the afternoons on which I was free, to long aimless rambles in London, or even farther afield. I have an absurd pleasure in observing the details of domestic architecture; and there is a variety of entertainment to be derived, for a person with this low and feeble taste, from the exploration of London, which would probably be inconceivable to persons of a more conscientious artistic standard.

A Rude Shock

At this period I had few intimates; and sociable as I had been at school and college, I was now thrown far more on my own resources; I sometimes think it was a wise and kindly preparation for what was coming; and I certainly learnt the pleasures to be derived from reading and lonely contemplation and solitary reflection, pleasures which have stood me in good stead in later days. I used indeed to think that the enforced spending of so many hours of the day with other human beings gave a peculiar zest to these solitary hours. Whether this was wholesome or natural I know not, but I certainly enjoyed it, and lived for several years a life of interior speculation which was neither sluggish nor morbid. I learnt my business thoroughly, and in all probability I should have settled down quietly and comfortably to the life of a bachelor official, rotating from chambers to office and from office to club, had it not been that just at the moment when I was beginning to crystallise into sluggish, comfortable habits, I was flung by a rude shock into a very different kind of atmosphere.

14

The Doctor

I must now relate, however briefly, the event which once for all determined the conditions of my present life. For the last six months of my professional work I had been feeling indefinitely though not decidedly unwell. I found myself disinclined to exertion, bodily or mental, easily elated, easily depressed, at times strangely somnolent, at others irritably wakeful; at last some troublesome symptoms warned me that I had better put myself in the hands of a doctor. I went to a local practitioner whose account disquieted me; he advised me to apply to an eminent specialist, which I accordingly did.

The Verdict

I am not likely to forget the incidents of that day. I went up to London, and made my way to the specialist’s house. After a dreary period of waiting, in a dark room looking out on a blank wall, the table abundantly furnished with periodicals whose creased and battered aspect betokened the nervous handling to which they had been subjected, I was at last summoned to the presence of the great man himself. He presented an appearance of imperturbable good-nature; his rosy cheeks, his little snub nose, his neatly groomed appearance, his gold-rimmed spectacles, wore an air of commonplace prosperity that was at once reassuring. He asked me a number of questions, made a thorough examination, writing down certain details in a huge volume, and finally threw himself back in his chair with a deliberate air that somewhat disconcerted me. At last my sentence came. I was undoubtedly suffering from the premonitory symptoms of a serious, indeed dangerous complaint, and I must at once submit myself to the condition of an invalid life. He drew out a table diet, and told me to live a healthy, quiet life under the most restful conditions attainable. He asked me about my circumstances, and I told him with as much calmness as I could muster. He replied that I was very fortunate, that I must at once give up professional work and be content to vegetate. “Mind,” he said, “I don’t want you to be bored—that will be as bad for you as to be overworked. But you must avoid all kinds of worry and fatigue—all extremes. I should not advise you to travel at present, if you like a country life—in fact I should say, live the life that attracts you, apart from any professional exertions; don’t do anything you don’t like. Now, Mr. ——,” he continued, “I have told you the worst—the very worst. I can’t say whether your constitution will triumph over this complaint: to be candid, I do not think it will; but there is no question of any immediate risk whatever. Indeed, if you were dependent on your own exertions for a livelihood, I could promise you some years of work—though that would render it almost impossible for you ever to recover. As it is, you may consider that you have a chance of entire recovery, and if you can follow my directions, and no unforeseen complications intervene, I think you may look forward to a fairly long life; but mind that any work you do must be of the nature of amusement. Once and for all, strain of any sort is out of the question, and if you indulge in any excessive or exciting exertions, you will inevitably shorten your life. There, I have told you a disagreeable truth—make the best of it—remember that I see many people every week who have to bear far more distressing communications. You had better come to see me every three months, unless you have any marked symptoms, such as”—(there followed medical details with which I need not trouble the reader)—“in that case come to me at once; but I tell you plainly that I do not anticipate them. You seem to have what I call the patient temperament—to have a vocation, if I may say so,” (here he smiled benevolently) “for the invalid life.” He rose as he spoke, shook hands kindly, and opened the door.

15

New Perceptions

I will confess that at first this communication was a great shock to me; I was for a time bewildered and plunged into a deep dejection. To say farewell to the bustle and activity of life—to be laid aside on a shelf, like a cracked vase, turning as far as possible my ornamental front to the world, spoilt for homely service. To be relegated to the failures; to be regarded and spoken of as an invalid—to live the shadowed life, a creature of rules and hours, fretting over drugs and beef tea—a degrading, a humiliating rôle. I admit that the first weeks of my enforced retirement were bitter indeed. The perpetual fret of small restrictions had at first the effect of making me feel physically and mentally incapable. Only very gradually did the sad cloud lift. The first thing that came to my help was a totally unexpected feeling. When I had got used to the altered conditions of life, when I found that the regulated existence had become to a large extent mechanical, when I had learnt to decide instinctively what I could attempt and what I must leave alone, I found my perceptions curiously heightened and intensified by the shadowy background which enveloped me. Sounds and sights thrilled me in an unaccustomed way—the very thought, hardly defined, but existing like a quiet subconsciousness, that my tenure of life was certainly frail, and might be brief, seemed to bring out into sharp relief the simple and unnoticed sensations of ordinary life. The pure gush of morning air through the opened casement, the delicious coolness of water on the languid body, the liquid song of birds, the sprouting of green buds upon the hedge, the sharp and aromatic scent of rosy larch tassels, the monotonous babble of the stream beneath its high water plants, the pearly laminæ of the morning cloudland, the glowing wrack of sunset with the liquid bays of intenser green—all these stirred my spirit with an added value of beauty, an enjoyment at once passionate and tranquil, as though they held some whispered secret for the soul.

The same quickening effect passed, I noticed, over intellectual perceptions. Pictures in which there was some latent quality, some hidden brooding, some mystery lying beneath and beyond superficial effect, gave up their secrets to my eye. Music came home to me with an intensity of pathos and passion which I had before never even suspected, and even here the same subtle power of appreciation seemed to have been granted me. It seemed that I was no longer taken in by technical art or mechanical perfection. The hard rippling cascades which had formerly attracted me, where a musician was merely working out, if I may use the word, some subject with a mathematical precision, seemed to me hollow and vain; all that was pompous and violent followed suit, and what I now seemed to be able to discern was all that endeavoured, however faultily, to express some ardour of the spirit, some indefinable delicacy of feeling.

Something of the same power seemed to be mine in dealing with literature. All hard brilliance, all exaggerated display, all literary agility and diplomacy that might have once deceived me, appeared to ring cracked and thin; mere style, style that concealed rather than expressed thought, fell as it were in glassy tingling showers on my initiated spirit; while, on the other hand, all that was truthfully felt, sincerely conceived or intensely desired, drew me as with a magical compulsion. It was then that I first perceived what the sympathy, the perception born of suffering might be, when that suffering was not so intrusive, so severe, as to throw the sick spirit back upon itself—then that I learnt what detachment, what spectatorial power might be conferred by a catastrophe not violent, but sure, by a presage of distant doom. I felt like a man who has long stumbled among intricate lanes, his view obscured by the deep-cut earth-walls of his prison, and by the sordid lower slopes with their paltry details, when the road leads out upon the open moor, and when at last he climbs freely and exultingly upon the broad grassy shoulders of the hill. The true perspective—the map of life opened out before me; I learnt that all art is only valuable when it is the sedulous flowering of the sweet and gracious spirit, and that beyond all power of human expression lies a province where the deepest thoughts, the highest mysteries of the spirit sleep—only guessed at, wrestled with, hankered after by the most skilled master of all the arts of mortal subtlety.

Perhaps the very thing that made these fleeting impressions so perilously sweet, was the sense of their evanescence.

But oh, the very reason why

I love them, is because they die.

The Shadow

In this exalted mood, with this sense of heightened perception all about me, I began for awhile to luxuriate. I imagined that I had learnt a permanent lesson, gained a higher level of philosophy, escaped from the grip of material things. Alas! it was but transitory. I had not triumphed. What I did gain, what did stay with me, was a more deliberate intention of enjoying simple things, a greater expectation of beauty in homely life. This remained, but in a diminished degree. I suppose that the mood was one of intense nervous tension, for by degrees it was shadowed and blotted, until I fell into a profound depression. At best what could I hope for?—a shadowed life, an inglorious gloom? The dull waste years stretched before me—days, weeks, months of wearisome little duties; dreary tending of the lamp of life; and what a life! life without service, joy, brightness, or usefulness. I was to be stranded like a hulk on an oozy shore, only thankful for every month that the sodden timbers still held together. I saw that something larger and deeper was required; I saw that religion and philosophy must unite to form some definite theory of life, to build a foundation on which I could securely rest.

16

The service of others, in some form or another, must sustain me. Philosophy pointed out that to narrow my circle every year, to turn the microscope of thought closer and closer upon my frail self, would be to sink month by month deeper into egotism and self-pity. Religion gave a more generous impulse still.

Beginnings

What is our duty with respect to philanthropy? It is obviously absurd to think that every one is bound to tie themselves hand and foot to some thoroughly uncongenial task. Fitness and vocation must come in. Clergy, doctors, teachers are perhaps the most obvious professional philanthropists; for either of the two latter professions I was incapacitated. Some hovering thought of attempting to take orders, and to become a kind of amateur, unprofessional curate, visited me; but my religious views made that difficult, and the position of a man who preaches what he does not wholly believe is inconsistent with self-respect. Christianity as taught by the sects seemed to me to have drifted hopelessly away from the detached simplicity inculcated by Christ; to have become a mere part of the social system, fearfully invaded and overlaid by centuries of unintelligent tradition. To work, for instance, even with Mr. Woodward, at his orders, on his system, would have been an impossibility both for him and for myself. I had, besides, a strong feeling that work, to be of use, must be done, not in a spirit of complacent self-satisfaction, but at least with some energy of enjoyment, some conviction. It seemed moreover clear that, for a time at all events, my place and position in the world was settled: I must live a quiet home life, and endeavour, at all events, to restore some measure of effective health. How could I serve my neighbours best? They were mostly quiet country people—a few squires and clergy, a few farmers, and many farm labourers. Should I accept a country life as my sphere, or was I bound to try and find some other outlet for whatever effectiveness I possessed? I came deliberately to the conclusion that I was not only not bound to go elsewhere, but that it was the most sensible, wisest, and Christian solution to stay where I was and make some experiments.

My Schemes

The next practical difficulty was how I could help. English people have a strong sense of independence. They would neither understand nor value a fussy, dragooning philanthropist, who bustled about among them, finding fault with their domestic arrangements, lecturing, dictating. I determined that I would try to give them the help they wanted; not the help I thought they ought to want. That I would go among them with no idea of improving, but of doing, if possible, neighbourly and unobtrusive kindnesses, and that under no circumstances would I diminish their sense of independence by weak generosity.

About this time, my mother at luncheon happened to mention that the widow of a small farmer, who was living in a cottage not fifty yards from our gate, was in trouble about her eldest boy, who was disobedient, idle, and unsatisfactory. He had been employed by more than one neighbour in garden work, but had lost two places by laziness and impertinence. Here was a point d’appui. In the afternoon I strolled across; nervous and shy, I confess, to a ridiculous degree. I knew the woman by sight, and little more. I felt thoroughly unfitted for my rôle, and feared that patronage would be resented. However, I went and found Mrs. Dewhurst at home. I was received with real geniality and something of delicate sympathy—the news of my illness had got about. I determined I would ask no leading questions, but bit by bit her anxieties were revealed: the boy was a trouble to her. “What did he want?” She didn’t know; but he was discontented and naughty, had got into bad company. I asked if it would be any good my seeing the boy, and found that it would evidently be a relief. I asked her to send the boy to me that evening, and went away with a real and friendly handshake, and an invitation to come again. In the evening Master Dewhurst turned up—a shy, uninteresting, rather insolent boy, strong and well-built, and with a world of energy in his black eyes. I asked him what he wanted to do, and after a little talk it all came out: he was sick of the place; he did not want garden work. “What would he do? What did he like?” I found that he wanted to see something of the world. Would he go to sea? The boy brightened up at once, and then said he didn’t want to leave his mother. Our interview closed, and this necessitated my paying a further call on the mother, who was most sensible, and evidently felt that what the boy wanted was a thorough change.

To make a long story short, it cost me a few letters and a very little money, defined as a loan; the boy went off to a training ship, and after a few weeks found that he had the very life he wanted; indeed, he is now a promising young sailor, who never fails to write to me at intervals, and who comes to see me whenever he comes home. The mother is a firm friend. Now that I am at my ease with her, I am astonished at the shrewdness and sense of her talk.

It would be tedious to recount, as I could, fifty similar adventures; my enterprises include a village band, a cricket club, a co-operative store; but the personal work, such as it is, has broadened every year: I am an informal adviser to thirty or forty families, and the correspondence entailed, to say nothing of my visits, gives me much pleasant occupation. The circle now insensibly widens; I do not pretend that there are not times of weariness, and even disagreeable experiences connected with it. I am a poor hand in a sick-room, I confess it with shame; my mother, who is not particularly interested in her neighbours, is ten times as effective.

The Reward

But what I feel most strongly about the whole, is the intense interest which has grown up about it. The trust which these simple folk repose in me is the factor which rescues me from the indolent impulse to leave matters alone; even if I desired to do so, I could not for very shame disappoint them. Moreover, I cannot pretend that it takes up very much time. The institutions run themselves for the most part. I don’t overdo my visits; indeed, I seldom go to call on my friends unless there is something specific to be done. But I am always at home for them between seven and eight. My downstairs smoking-room, once an office, has a door which opens on the drive, so that it is not necessary for these Nicodemite visitors to come through the house. Sometimes for days together I have no one; sometimes I have three or four callers in the evening. I don’t talk religion as a rule, unless I am asked; but we discuss politics and local matters with avidity. I have persistently refused to take any office, and I fear that our neighbours think me a very lazy kind of dilettante, who happens to be interested in the small-talk of rustics. I will not be a Guardian, as I have little turn for business; and when it was suggested to me that I might be a J. P., I threw cold water on the scheme. Any official position would alter my relation to my friends, and I should often be put in a difficulty; but by being absolutely unattached, I find that confidential dealings are made easy.

I fear that this will sound a very shabby, unromantic, and gelatinous form of philanthropy, and I am quite unable to defend it on utilitarian principles. I can only say that it is deeply absorbing; that it pays, so to speak, a large interest on a small investment of trouble, and that it has given me a sense of perspective in human things which I never had before. The difficulty in writing about it is to abstain from platitudes; I can only say that it has revealed to me how much more emotion and experience go to make up a platitude than I ever suspected before in my ambitious days.

17

Ennui is, after all, the one foe that we all fear; and in arranging our life, the most serious preoccupation is how to escape it. The obvious reply is, of course, “plenty of cheerful society.” But is not general society to a man with a taste for seclusion the most irritating, wearing, ennuyeux method of filling the time? It is not the actual presence of people that is distressing, though that in some moods is unbearable, but it is the consciousness of duties towards them, whether as host or guest, that sits, like the Old Man of the Sea, upon one’s shoulders. A considerable degree of seclusion can be attained by a solitary-minded man at a large hotel. The only time of the day when you are compelled to be gregarious is the table d’hôte dinner; and then, even if you desire to talk, it is often made impossible by the presence of foreigners among whom one is sandwiched. But take a visit at a large English country-house; a mixed party with possibly little in common; the protracted meals, the vacuous sessions, the interminable promenades. Men are better off than women in this respect, as at most periods of the year they are swept off in the early forenoon to some vigorous employment, and are not expected to return till tea-time. But take such a period in August, a month in which many busy men are compelled to pay visits if they pay them at all. Think of the desultory cricket matches, the futile gabble of garden parties.

Of course the desire of solitude, or rather, the nervous aversion to company, may become so intense as to fall under the head of monomania; doctors give it an ugly name, I know not exactly what it is, like the agoraphobia, which is one of the subsections of a certain form of madness. Agoraphobia is the nervous horror of crowds, which causes persons afflicted by it to swoon away at the prospect of having to pass through a square or street crowded with people.

But the dislike of visitors is a distinct, but quite as specific form of nervous mania. One lady of whom I have heard was in the habit of darting to the window and involving herself in the window-curtain the moment she heard a ring at the bell; another, more secretive still, crept under the sofa. Not so very long ago I went over a great house in the North; my host took me to a suite of upper rooms with a charming view. “These,” he said, “were inhabited by my old aunt Susan till her death some months ago; she was somewhat eccentric in her habits”—here he thrust his foot under a roomy settee which stood in the window, and to my intense surprise a bell rang loudly underneath—“Ah,” he said, rather shamefacedly, “they haven’t taken it off.” I begged for an explanation, and he said that the old lady had formed an inveterate habit of creeping under the settee the moment she heard a knock at the door; to cure her of it, they hung a bell on a spring beneath it, so that she gave warning of her whereabouts.

Solitude

Society is good for most of us; but solitude is equally good, as a tonic medicine, granted that sociability is accepted as a factor in our life. A certain deliberate solitude, like the fast days in the Roman Church, is useful, even if only by way of contrast, and that we may return with fresh zest to ordinary intercourse.

People who are used to sociable life find the smallest gap, the smallest touch of solitude oppressive and ennuyeux; and it may be taken for granted that the avoidance of ennui, in whatever form that whimsical complaint makes itself felt, is one of the most instinctive prepossessions of the human race; but it does not follow that solitude should not be resolutely practised; and any sociable person who has strength of mind to devote, say, one day of the week to absolute and unbroken loneliness would find not only that such times would come to have a positive value of their own, but that they would enhance infinitely the pleasures of social life.

It is a curious thing how fast the instinct for solitude grows. A friend of mine, a clergyman, a man of an inveterately sociable disposition, was compelled by the exigencies of his position to take charge of a lonely sea-coast parish, the incumbent of which had fallen desperately ill. The parish was not very populous, and extremely scattered; the nearest houses, inhabited by educated people were respectively four and five miles away—my friend was poor, an indifferent walker, and had no vehicle at his command.

He went off, he told me, with extreme and acute depression. He found a small rectory-house with three old silent servants. He established himself there with his books, and began in a very heavy-hearted way to discharge the duties of the position; he spent his mornings in quiet reading or strolling—the place lay at the top of high cliffs and included many wild and magnificent prospects. The afternoon he spent in trudging over the parish, making himself acquainted with the farmers and other inhabitants of the region. In the evening he read and wrote again. He had not been there a week before he became conscious that the life had a charm. He had written in the first few days of his depression to several old friends imploring them to have mercy on his loneliness. Circumstances delayed their arrival, and at last when he had been there some six weeks, a letter announcing the arrival of an old friend and his wife for a week’s visit gave him, he confessed, far more annoyance than pleasure. He entertained them, however, but felt distinctly relieved when they departed. At the end of the six months I saw him, and he told me that solitude was a dangerous Circe, seductive, delicious, but one that should be resolutely and deliberately shunned, an opiate of which one could not estimate the fascination. And I am not speaking of a torpid or indolent man, but a man of force, intellect, and cultivation, of a restless mind and vivid interests.

[The passages that follow were either extracted by the author himself from his own diaries, or are taken from a notebook containing fragments of an autobiographical character. When the date is ascertainable it is given at the head of the piece.—J. T.]

18

Now I will draw, carefully, faithfully, and lovingly, the portraits of some of my friends; they are not ever likely to set eyes on the delineation: and if by some chance they do, they will forgive me, I think.

I have chosen three or four of the most typical of my not very numerous neighbours, though there are many similar portraits scattered up and down my diaries.

It happened this morning that a small piece of parish business turned up which necessitated my communicating with Sir James, our chief landowner. Staunton is his name, and his rank is baronet. He comes from a typically English stock. As early as the fourteenth century the Stauntons seem to have held land in the parish; they were yeomen, no doubt, owning a few hundred acres of freehold. In the sixteenth century one of them drifted to London, made a fortune, and, dying childless, left his money to the head of the house, who bought more land, built a larger house, became esquire, and eventually knight; his brass is in the church. They were unimaginative folk, and whenever the country was divided, they generally contrived to find themselves upon the prosaic and successful side.

The Bishop

Early in the eighteenth century there were two brothers: the younger, a clergyman, by some happy accident became connected with the Court, made a fortunate marriage, and held a deanery first, and then a bishopric. Here he amassed a considerable fortune. His portrait, which hangs at the Park, represents a man with a face of the shape and colour of a ripe plum, with hardly more distinction of feature, shrouded in a full wig. Behind him, under a velvet curtain, stands his cathedral, in a stormy sky. The bishop’s monument is one of the chief disfigurements, or the chief ornaments of our church, according as your taste is severe or catholic. It represents the deceased prelate in a reclining attitude, with a somewhat rueful expression, as of a man fallen from a considerable height. Over him bends a solicitous angel in the attitude of one inquiring what is amiss. One of the prelate’s delicate hands is outstretched from a gigantic lawn sleeve, like a haggis, which requires an iron support to sustain it; the other elbow is propped upon some marble volumes of controversial divinity. In an alcove behind is a tumid mitre, quite putting into the shade a meagre celestial crown with marble rays, which is pushed unceremoniously into the top of the recess.

The Baronets

The bishop succeeded his elder brother in the estate, and added largely to the property. The bishop’s only son sat for a neighbouring borough, and was created a baronet for his services, which were of the most straightforward kind. At this point, by one of the strange freaks of which even county families are sometimes guilty, a curious gleam of romance flashed across the dull record. The baronet’s eldest son developed dim literary tastes, drifted to London, became a hanger-on of the Johnsonian circle—his name occurs in footnotes to literary memoirs of the period; married a lady of questionable reputation, and published two volumes of “Letters to a Young Lady of Quality,” which combine, to a quite singular degree, magnificence of diction with tenuity of thought. This Jack Staunton was a spendthrift, and would have made strange havoc of the estate, but his father fortunately outlived him; and by the offer of a small pension to Mrs. Jack, who was left hopelessly destitute, contrived to get the little grandson and heir into his own hands. The little boy developed into the kind of person that no one would desire as a descendant, but that all would envy as an ancestor. He was a miser pure and simple. In his day the tenants were ground down, rents were raised, plantations were made, land was acquired in all directions; but the house became ruinous, and the miserable owner, in a suit of coarse cloth like a second-rate farmer, sneaked about his lands with a shy and secret smile, avoiding speech with tenants and neighbours alike, and eating small and penurious meals in the dusty dining-room in company with an aged and drunken bailiff, the discovery of whose constant attempts to defraud his master of a few shillings were the delight and triumph of the baronet’s life. He died a bachelor; at his death a cousin, a grandson of the first baronet, succeeded, and found that whatever else he had done, the miser had left immense accumulations of money behind him. This gentleman was in the army, and fought at Waterloo, after which he imitated the example of his class, and became an unflinching Tory politician. The fourth baronet was a singularly inconspicuous person whom I can just remember, whose principal diversion was his kennel. I have often seen him when, as a child, I used to lunch there with my mother, stand throughout the meal in absolute silence, sipping a glass of sherry on the hearthrug, and slowly munching a large biscuit, and, before we withdrew, producing from his pocket the envelopes which had contained the correspondence of the morning, and filling them with bones, pieces of fat, fag-ends of joints, to bestow upon the dogs in the course of the afternoon. This habit I considered, as a child, to be distinctly agreeable, and I should have been deeply disappointed if Sir John had ever failed to do it.

Sir James

The present Sir James is now a man of forty. He was at Eton and Trinity, and for a short time in the Guards. He married the daughter of a neighbouring baronet, and at the age of thirty, when his father died, settled down to the congenial occupation of a country gentleman. He is, in spite of the fact that he had a large landed estate, a very wealthy man. I imagine he has at least £20,000 a year. He has a London house, to which Lady Staunton goes for the season, but Sir James, who makes a point of accompanying her, soon finds that business necessitates his at once returning to the country; and I am not sure that the summer months, which he spends absolutely alone, are not the most agreeable part of the year for him. He has three stolid and healthy children—two boys and a girl. He takes no interest whatever in politics, religion, literature, or art. He takes in the Standard and the Field. He hunts a little, and shoots a little, but does not care about either. He spends his morning and afternoon in pottering about the estate. In the evening he writes a few letters, dines well, reads the paper and goes to bed. He does not care about dining out; indeed the prospect of a dinner-party or a dance clouds the pleasure of the day. He goes to church once on Sunday; he is an active magistrate; he has, at long intervals, two or three friends of like tastes to stay with him, who accompany him, much to his dislike, in his perambulations, and stand about whistling, or staring at stacks and cattle, while he talks to the bailiff. But he is a kindly, cheery, generous man, with a good head for business, and an idea of his position. He is absolutely honourable and straightforward, and faces an unpleasant duty, when he has made up his mind to it, with entire tranquillity. No mental speculation has ever come in his way; at school he was a sound, healthy boy, good at games, who did his work punctually, and was of blameless character. He made no particular friends; sat through school after school, under various sorts of masters, never inattentive, and never interested. He had a preference for dull and sober teachers, men with whom, as he said, “you knew where you were;” a stimulating teacher bewildered him,—“always talking about poetry and rot.” At Cambridge it was the same. He rowed in his College boat; he passed the prescribed examinations; he led a clean healthy decorous life; and no idea, small or great, no sense of beauty, no wonder at the scheme of things, ever entered his head. If by chance he ever found himself in the company of an enthusiastic undergraduate, whose mind and heart were full of burning, incomplete, fantastic thoughts, James listened politely to what he had to say, hazarded no statements, and said, in quiet after-comment, “Gad, how that chap does jaw!” No one ever thought him stupid; he knew what was going on; he was sociable, kind, not the least egotistical, and far too much of a gentleman to exhibit the least complacency in his position or wealth—only he knew exactly what he liked, and had none of the pathetic admiration for talent that is sometimes found in the unintellectual. When he went into the Guards it was just the same. He was popular and respected, friendly with his men, perfectly punctual, capable and respectable. He had no taste for wine or gambling, or disreputable courses. He admired nobody and nothing, and no one ever obtained the slightest influence over him. At home he was perfectly happy, kind to his sisters, ready to do anything he was asked, and to join in anything that was going on. When he succeeded to the estate, he went quietly to work to find a wife, and married a pretty, contented girl, with the same notions as himself. He never said an unkind thing to her, or to any of his family, and expressed no extravagant affection for any one. He is trustee for all his relations, and always finds time to look after their affairs. He is always ready to subscribe to any good object, and had contrived never to squabble with an angular ritualistic clergyman, who thinks him a devoted son of the Church. He has declined several invitations to stand for Parliament, and has no desire to be elevated to the Peerage. He will probably live to a green old age, and leave an immense fortune. I do not fancy that he is much given to meditate about his latter end; but if he ever lets his mind range over the life beyond the grave, he probably anticipates vaguely that, under somewhat airy conditions, he will continue to enjoy the consideration of his fellow-beings, and deserve their respect.

19

For nearly ten years after we came to Golden End, the parish was administered by an elderly clergyman, who had already been over twenty years in the place. He was little known outside the district at all; I doubt if, between the occasion of his appointment to the living and his death, his name ever appeared in the papers. The Bishop of the diocese knew nothing of him; if the name was mentioned in clerical society, it was dismissed again with some such comment as “Ah, poor Woodward! an able man, I believe, but utterly unpractical;” and yet I have always held this man to be on the whole one of the most remarkable people I have ever known.

Mr. Woodward

He was a tall thin man, with a slight stoop. He could not be called handsome, but his face had a strange dignity and power; he had a pallid complexion, at times indeed like parchment from its bloodlessness, and dark hair which remained dark up to the very end. His eyebrows were habitually drawn up, giving to his face a look of patient endurance; his eyelids drooped over his eyes, which gave his expression a certain appearance of cynicism, but when he opened them full, and turned them upon you, they were dark, passionate, and with a peculiar brightness. His lips were full and large, with beautiful curves, but slightly compressed as a rule, which gave a sense of severity. He was clean shaven, and always very carefully dressed, but in somewhat secular style, with high collars, a frock-coat and waistcoat, a full white cambric tie, and—I shudder to relate it in these days—he was seldom to be seen in black trousers, but wore a shade of dark grey. If you had substituted a black tie for a white one you would have had an ordinary English layman dressed as though for town—for he always wore a tall hat. He often rode about the parish, when he wore a dark grey riding-suit with gaiters. I do not think he ever gave his clothes a thought, but he had the instincts of a fine gentleman, and loved neatness and cleanliness. He had never married, but his house was administered by an elderly sister—rather a grim, majestic personage, with a sharp ironical tongue, and no great indulgence for weakness. Miss Woodward considered herself an invalid, and only appeared in fine weather, driving in a smart little open carriage. They were people of considerable wealth, and the rectory, which was an important house standing in a large glebe, had two gardeners and good stables, and was furnished within, in a dignified way, with old solid furniture. Mr. Woodward had a large library, and at the little dinner-parties that he gave, where the food was of the simplest, the plate was ancient and abundant—old silver candlesticks and salvers in profusion—and a row of family pictures beamed on you from the walls. Mr. Woodward used to say, if any one admired any particular piece of plate, “Yes, I believe it is good; it was all collected by an old uncle of mine, who left it to me with his blessing for my lifetime. Of course I don’t quite approve of using it—I believe I ought not even to have two coats—but I can’t sell it, and meantime it looks very nice and does no harm.” The living was a wealthy one, but it was soon discovered that Mr. Woodward spent all that he received on that head in the parish. He did not pauperise idle parishioners, but he was always ready with a timely gift to tide an honest man over a difficulty. He liked to start the boys in life, and would give a girl a little marriage portion. He paid for a parish nurse, but at the same time he insisted on almsgiving as a duty. “I don’t do these things to save you the trouble of giving,” he would say, “but to give you a lead; and if I find that the offertories go down, then my subscriptions will go down too;” but he would sometimes say that he feared he was making things difficult for his successor. “I can’t help that; if he is a good man the people will understand.”

The Church

Mr. Woodward was a great politician and used to say that it was a perpetual temptation to him to sit over the papers in the morning instead of doing his work. But the result was that he always had something to talk about, and his visits were enjoyed by the least spiritual of his parishioners. He was of course eclectic in his politics, and combined a good deal of radicalism with an intense love and veneration for the past. He restored his church with infinite care and taste, and was for ever beautifying it in small ways. He used to say that there were two kinds of church-goers—the people who liked the social aspect of the service, who preferred a blaze of light, hearty singing, and the presence of a large number of people; but that were others who preferred it from the quiet and devotional side, and who were only distracted from the main object of the service by the presence of alert and critical persons. Consequently he had a little transept divided from the body of the church by a simple screen, and kept the lights low within it. The transept was approached by a separate door, and he invited people who could not come for the whole service to slip in for a little of it. At the same time there was plenty of room in the church, and as the parish is not thickly populated, so that you could be sure of finding a seat in any part of the church that suited your mood. He never would have a surpliced choir; and in the morning service, nothing was sung except the canticles and hymns; but there was a fine organ built at his expense, and he offered a sufficiently large salary to secure an organist of considerable taste and skill. He greatly believed in music, and part of the organist’s duty was to give a little recital once a week, which was generally well attended. He himself was always present at the choir practices, and the result of the whole was that the congregation sang well, with a tone and a feeling that I have never heard in places where the indigenous materials for choral music were so scanty.

Mr. Woodward talked a good deal on religious subjects, but with an ease and a naturalness which saved his hearers from any feeling of awkwardness or affectation. I have never heard any one who seemed to live so naturally in the seen and the unseen together, and his transitions from mundane to religious talk were made with such simplicity that his hearers felt no embarrassment or pain. After all, the ethical side of life is what we are all interested in—moreover, Mr. Woodward had a decidedly magnetic gift—that gift which, if it had been accompanied with more fire and volubility, would have made him an orator. As it was, the circle to whom he talked felt insensibly interested in what he spoke of, and at the same time there was such a transparent simplicity about the man that no one could have called him affected. His talk it would be impossible to recall; it depended upon all sorts of subtle and delicate effects of personality. Indeed, I remember once after an evening spent in his company, during which he had talked with an extraordinary pathos and emotion, I wrote down what I could remember of it. I look at it now and wonder what the spell was; it seems so ordinary, so simple, so, may I say, platitudinal.

Yet I may mention two or three of his chance sayings. I found him one day in his study deeply engrossed in a book which I saw was the Life of Darwin. He leapt to his feet to greet me, and after the usual courtesies said, “What a wonderful book this is—it is from end to end nothing but a cry for the Nicene Creed! The man walks along, doing his duty so splendidly and nobly, with such single-heartedness and simplicity, and just misses the way all the time; the gospel he wanted is just the other side of the wall. But he must know now, I think. Whenever I go to the Abbey, I always go straight to his grave, and kneel down close beside it, and pray that his eyes may be opened. Very foolish and wrong, I dare say, but I can’t help it!”